


Dog Bites

by jerseydevious



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Implied/Referenced Torture, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Post-Episode: s04e13 Escape From Kadavo, Slavery, but this fic is meaner lol, in which i ruthlessly make people talk about it, none of the tags or warnings happen in the fic, rex needs a vacation and a margarita, this arc was SO MEAN
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:14:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29498649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Anakin, Ahsoka, and Rex return with Obi-Wan to Coruscant so he can receive treatment for the torture he went through at the Kadavo processing facility. Which is a fancy way of saying, everyone has the most incredible opportunity to have meltdowns in each other's direction, and, who knows, maybe they'll even reach some important emotional conclusions before they all get viciously exploited by the friendly neighborhood Dark Lord of the Sith.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 144
Kudos: 298





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Scroll up! Read the tags! Check them very carefully and ask yourself if you're ready to be very brutal about those subjects, because this is brutal! It's very extremely mean in every possible direction! I am not kidding you, especially if you're a new reader of mine, please go in knowing that I pull no punches whatsoever. I have a bit of a reputation for punching people in the gut when I want to, this has not stopped, but I gained a lot of new followers in my return to Star Wars and I will emphasize, deliberately, that this could be a fairly grueling read at times. I do it in pursuit of the characters crying on each other and hugging each other at the same time, but it is still pretty grueling. None of the tags and warnings occur onscreen in the fic, but they are _heavily_ referenced. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat! 
> 
> Anyway, I rewatched the Zygerria arc. I cheerfully inform you that it was much worse than I remembered! By a lot! So in my head I planned out something that's less of a story and more of a group of meltdowns various troubled people have at each other, and arrived at this point, because I crave emotional catharsis. This arc is a nightmare. I am going to kick it in the dick.

Plo Koon’s flagship connected with a medical frigate carrying heavily injured soldiers to Coruscant, and the Jedi Master saw them off with a wave and an assurance that 501st, bereft of its general, commander, and captain, would be alright for the time being under his care. Anakin had figured they would be—Master Plo was a bit infamous among the Jedi Generals for how well he bonded with his clone troopers, and the name _Plo’s Bros_ was thrown around either derisively or endearingly, depending on which Jedi was speaking. The 212th, missing only its general, would return to its normal place in the Open Circle Fleet, with Commander Cody as the acting general. Anakin hardly remembered congratulating him. He wasn’t sure he had, even. Anakin hardly remembered how Master Plo had planned to reintegrate the colonists to their home on Kiros, only broken words about aid shipments, petitions, committees. _If you’re going to help them, just help them, don’t ask anyone else if you can,_ Anakin wanted to snarl. But he himself wanted to help them, but now that they were all free he had no idea how, and the medics had put Obi-Wan under hours ago and Ahsoka had disappeared until minutes before they were to transition with Obi-Wan to the frigate so he let Master Plo make the choices and the decisions. He knew the Kel Dor Master had been—albeit gently—asking for input, but Anakin had won his freedom without even knowing he’d won it and most of the time it felt foreign to him. As brutal as it felt to think, the colonists had only spent two weeks enslaved, a brief detour from their peaceful and prosperous lives on Kiros; they probably knew more about being free than Anakin did. But he had to rip that black and rotted thought out at the root, because it raised a fury in him that felt like Tatooine’s blindingly hot sunset and a false-warm weight in his arms and he had waited ten years, _ten years,_ to hear his mother again, the first time anyone had confessed to loving him in ten years, and she had died before she had finished saying it—

Ahsoka had been late. She had rushed up, breathing hard, mumbling _sorry, Master, I got—I got—distracted, sorry, sorry,_ and Anakin had just dipped his head. His words had failed him. His mind was vicious, now, and he didn’t trust himself to speak, because there would be something—he would say something—he would do something cruel. On Tatooine the slavedrivers and slavemasters had used anooba to keep them in line, anooba tied on thick bantha-leather cords, snapping and howling with their bone-crunching jaws and claws that were dull but could shred flesh with enough force. They were kept just on the edge of starving, the pungent smell of dirty slave bodies and sentient misery whetting their appetites, long sand-grit strings of slobber dangling from their teeth and jaws—Anakin remembered their teeth and talons well. Their leashes were long enough that the drivers would just loose a length of it, should he falter, should he fail, and the anooba’s paws would tear up orange plumes of sand in pursuit; and as much as Anakin had hated them, for every bite and tear he’d lived and for every one his mother had lived, he felt like one now. He understood them now. Anakin knew what they were hungry for now. If that leash loosened just so—he would tear across the sand, snarling, sink baleful teeth into the skin of a shoulder, a thigh, a leg. So he would say no words, he would make no moves, he would be as a moving corpse before he’d be an attack dog, but blast it all, if he wasn’t starving, and blast it all, if he wasn’t straining against his own grip, lured in by dirty slave bodies and sentient misery and the barest hint that something starved as much as he did. Blast it all if Anakin wasn’t bloodthirsty and willing to make it everyone else’s problem.

The Queen had wanted an animal. _Do you know how many of my warriors it took to pull you down,_ she had said, breathlessly, minutes after he’d tried to choke her to death. It had driven her wild, that he had stopped when she asked. _Five of them, whips wrapped around you, pulling you down by your neck, and you resisted—gorgeous, like nothing I’d ever seen._ The Queen had wanted him because he was starving and furious. The way she had whispered his name, through her crushed throat, _Skywalker,_ like she’d never seen anything more beautiful—his skin crawled. The Queen had wanted a dog. If Dooku hadn’t arrived when he did, in the pit of himself where all things rotted, Anakin knew that he would have been her dog. Deep in the pit of himself where all things rotted, where nothing saw the light of day and Anakin only thought about it alone and under the cover of darkness, Anakin knew that he would have been her dog, because he slaughtered animals and he slaughtered like an animal. If Padmé—if his loving, gentle, kind wife—loved him despite that, then the Queen had loved him because of it, and in the dark of night where all things and especially angels died, he would know that it was the Queen’s love he had truly earned. _Gorgeous, like nothing I’d ever seen,_ and he’d wanted to kill every Zygerrian in that arena. He would have thrown away his lightsaber and beat them to death, learned from his last mistake; a lightsaber was too refined a weapon, and for a slaughter he would have to be gnashing teeth and rage. It would have driven the Queen into a frenzy. If he had done that, she might have chained him to her bed in the day, too. At least metal chains weren’t close enough to the bantha-leather leashes and corded collars that the anooba in the back of his mind wore—he would have been able to pretend there was a difference, between him and them. But now that it was behind him all that was in front of him was an uncomfortable truth he didn’t want to see.

The officers onboard had given Obi-Wan his own room—courtesy of being a Jedi General. It was frigid, but nothing burned like the cold, and for once Anakin welcomed the hard shivering, the ache. In the light, Obi-Wan’s bruises and cuts stood out in sharp relief, the cut of his cheekbones too high and too defined. Anakin slouched in the seat beside him and watched the glow of Artoo’s flickering indicators as Artoo shared a charging station with one of the Emdee units. The other Emdee puttered around in the stores, blatting out notes on inventory here and there, evidently just looking to pass the time. Artoo answered in sleepy whistles, sometimes, but they were usually mindless, meaningless clicks and whirs of binary, the kind he always made when charging. Anakin liked to think the little guy was dreaming, and then wondered what he dreamed of. Oil baths, no doubt—explosions, maybe. Spaceflight. Shocking Obi-Wan for fun.

“Artoo,” Anakin rumbled, and the droid clicked a couple beats; don’t tell me what to do.

Anakin chuckled. “I was just going to tell you to remind me to get you an oil bath set up when we get back.”

There was an excited little wobble, and Anakin laughed, but Artoo’s lights went back to their dull flickering soon afterwards.

“I wouldn’t mind an oil bath, Master Jedi,” the Emdee droid said, wandering into the room. Anakin had always found their monotonal voices soothing—but that was intentional, then, wasn’t it, on the part of the design. “Some of my joints lock up these days.”

Anakin tilted his head. Fixing things, he could do—in the dark with nothing to chase but his beasts, he would so much rather find things to fix. “Oh, really? Is it more than one?”

The Emdee tilted his head, and then tapped his shoulder with a metallic clink, and then leaned over to tap his knee on the same side. “These two, I fear.”

“Might actually be a problem with the connections,” Anakin said. “I can fix that here. But an oil bath wouldn’t hurt, either.”

The Emdee rattled as close as a droid could get to a laugh. “It would not. Could you truly?”

“I’m pretty good at fixing things,” Anakin said. He raised his right arm. “I’m one-fourth droid, anyway. This is metal.”

The Emdee bleated. “I trust your assessment of your skills, Master Jedi. Is your arm functioning well? I can look at it, in return.”

Anakin shrugged. “If you want to. It doesn’t really hurt, though.”

“Define ‘really,’” the Emdee said, waddling over.

Anakin stood, and gestured to the seat—he could fix a receptor issue faster than a droid could fix the dull, constant ache in the end of his arm—and shuffled around for a flashlight. He found one, and fit it between his teeth, and set to work, making small talk with the Emdee droid here and there, mumbling around the flashlight; receptor issues, definitely, and corroded wires that Anakin used a bit of electrical tape from his belt to cover up. Soothing, easy work, and the Emdee droid was a nice little guy, with a number of good stories; apparently he was a conscripted droid, and a lifetime ago he’d worked in the medical wing of a band of pirates. When Anakin was done, and he could talk easier without the flashlight in his mouth, he told the Emdee unit about his stint as a captive of Hondo Ohnaka, which the little guy found so funny he rattled with it.

“Thank you, Master Jedi,” the Emdee said, testing his range of motion in his arm. “This is—much preferable. You are good company.”

“To droids only,” Anakin said, grinning. “Does your programming let you just call me Anakin?”

The Emdee stilled, and then a scan flickered to life, a bright brilliant green grid scouring Anakin’s face. “Your designation is Anakin,” the Emdee said, finally.

Anakin dipped his head. “Thanks, buddy. If those joints bother you again, let me know.”

“Of course, Anakin. Do you still want your arm to be looked over? I would be happy to do so.”

Anakin squirmed. “There’s—actually something—I can’t really ask anyone else, I’m sorry. And I won’t—I don’t like memory wipes, so I won’t, but I’d like it if you could bury this log somewhere, if you can.”

The Emdee inclined his head. “You have invoked the confidentiality clause, Anakin. If anyone asks, I will tell them no such record exists, and this will be uploaded to your medical file but only accessible upon the entrance of a specific password. What is your password?”

Anakin rattled off a long list of letters and numbers, none of which he had any intent of remembering; these tests would stay between him and this Emdee unit. The Emdee then led him off, and Anakin explained, and—he had forgotten what a balm it was, the nonchalance of Emdee units. No pity, no judgement, no explanation as to why a Jedi Knight returning from an undercover mission where he sat at the hand of the Queen would need sexual disease and infection tests, simply flat acceptance, not even a lick of curiosity. At most, there was maybe a distant kindness. He could almost feel guiltless, hunched there waiting for results while chatting with the Emdee, and could almost feel relieved, when the Emdee destroyed the samples and the evidence of the test in compliance with the confidentiality clause. Almost, because in the depth of himself, he knew he was only ever straining against leashes, and that even this was just another tie around his neck.

Anakin lingered as long as he could, until Artoo was finished charging, and then waved off the Emdee and gave Obi-Wan a last glance—he’d been changed from his shredded Jedi robes, into a standard set of white pants and a shirt and socks, and bacta patches covered the long billowing shreds in his skin. Anakin ached for him all the same; he looked thinner, and tired even while he slept, and in pain even though the pain killers pumping through him were as powerful as they came. _You’re blocking the door,_ Artoo beeped at him, crossly, and Anakin let the little bastard droid nudge him forward.

A medical frigate was far calmer at Coruscant standard night than a capital ship; a capital ship never stopped running, as the war never stopped raging. A medical frigate at this hour was populated by medical droids and the night rotation of staff, and everyone moved as if they had important places to be, but it was a quiet work. The noise of shuffling and wheeled carts and minimal, terse conversation, nothing like the chaos of hundreds of soldiers with their scant downtime and braying laughter. Anakin walked quietly, ignoring Artoo’s mournful, occasional commentary, and traced the bond he had with Ahsoka all the way back to the non-priority quarters he’d been assigned himself, instead of the ones she’d been assigned beside him. He tried not to feel guilty about keeping her waiting. The guilt would make him furious. He had a leash; he had to hold on with everything he had.

“Hi,” he said, scrubbing at his eyes. The frigate dimmed the hallways, to simulate night. Ahsoka was burning the fluorescent overhead at full brightness. It stabbed at his eyes.

“Hi,” she answered, and he noticed—with a jolt—that she was sitting on the cot, knees drawn up to her chest, buried beneath one of his cloaks. His heart twisted. She looked excruciatingly small, excruciatingly young. Taking her on this mission, letting it happen, the way he’d helped design it—the shadows beneath his eyes were brands against himself, the way the burns and breaks on Obi-Wan were, the way the bruises around Rex’s neck from the control collars were. Ahsoka was only fourteen. But then something in Anakin balked at that, shuddering, because he had been fourteen years younger—that was not to be thought about.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I’ve been better,” she said, in a small voice.

Anakin patted Artoo’s dome, and the little droid said, _no, I’m not getting involved,_ and rolled off to the corner and immediately blatted out his shutdown sequence. “You’re real helpful,” he told the droid, sullenly, and then looked back at Ahsoka. “If you want to—”

“I have a question,” she blurted, and then cringed backwards when she realized she’d spoken over him, her face scrunching. “Sorry, Master.”

Anakin waved a hand. “I’ll get you for it tomorrow. Respect, something, respect, you know the drill. Be ready. What’s your question?”

She looked at him, nervously, and Anakin viscerally remembered being her age—he was still overemotional, but at that age he’d spilled out over all the edges, in all the ways, for reasons he could never figure out. He’d never figured out how to tell Obi-Wan that everything seemed to burn beneath his sternum. Still couldn’t figure it out, but at least, now, he’d made peace with the idea that he never would. It hadn’t been helped by Obi-Wan standing in the doorway, arms crossed, looking—domineering, imperious, steadfast and unmoving, and no matter how desperately Anakin had wanted it from him, he’d never give an inch. The Chancellor had always said it didn’t seem like Obi-Wan much cared for him. Anakin didn’t want it to be true, but the Chancellor had never lied to him.

Anakin crossed the room, and settled on the bed, elbows braced on his knees. “Tired,” he said, by way of explanation, though truthfully he wasn’t. His sleeplessness had eclipsed tired. He had been awake long enough that sleep would never find him again, and his sleep was poison, so Anakin didn’t mind.

“I can ask tomorrow,” she said.

Anakin waved a hand. “We have nothing to do tomorrow but sleep in, no reason to put it off.”  
  


“I—I told Governor Roshti,” Ahsoka began, and her voice got thready and gave out, so she drew his cloak higher around herself and sucked in a deep breath. “I told Governor Roshti that maybe this would make our people stronger. If we got through it and survived, then—we’re stronger for living it, right? I felt it. I knew it. And then after everything died down, I—I think I lied to him, Master. I don’t want to lie to him.”

Anakin stilled. He understood the silent question, there _—_ _you lived this, are you stronger?—_ and burned, beneath his sternum, burned like the sun. “I don’t know why you and Master Plo think I know how they feel,” he snapped.

Ahsoka flinched. “I’m sorry, Master.”

Anakin stood, anger barreling through him—paws kicking up plumes of orange sand, the barking, the snapping. “You’re not subtle,” he snarled. “You think I know how they feel? You think I know? They were ripped from their perfect lives on their peaceful planet and lived two weeks of hell, and even if it was hell, it was two weeks of it. My mother lived decades. It was all I knew. What do I know about ten minutes of slavery—what do I know about putting two weeks of hell behind—I lived it for ten years, it’s _everything I know—”_

Anakin shut his mouth so quickly his teeth cracked together. His own words rung in him hollowly, and he could feel Ahsoka’s eyes on him, and—when he was seven, Watto had decided that he and his mother had gotten too comfortable and had taken them to the Grand Auction. No intent, really, to sell them, but they hadn’t known that, of course they wouldn’t have, and slaves were sold bare and given only long sheets to protect from the whipping sand on the wind and the burning sun, and there was shuffling and lifting to prove you weren’t lame and there was poking and prodding to see what your body had to offer and questions to ensure you could speak and your Master espoused your skills because you couldn’t be trusted to do so. His mother had clutched him before they were separated to be valued and whispered the only blessing they had, the only decent phrase Huttese had to offer, _luke aahl ali khan, love walks with you._ He could hear her saying it even now. He had carved the symbol of it into the jappor snippet he had given Padmé. Those words had been all he knew. Watto had taken them back, smug, having taught them a lesson about appreciating their hovel and their scraps and their dog bites and their dirty slave bodies and sentient misery, a valuable lesson of value, that as far as laborers they were nothing to fetch a high price. One man had taken a prod and poked at a deep, jagged scar on Anakin’s thigh, and gurgled a comment about how those dog bites always ruined good, pleasurable flesh. No one in Mos Espa cared about his dog bites, though. Gutter trash slaves lived in Mos Espa and it was gutter trash pleasure that was bought in Mos Espa.

It was cold in space. Nothing burned like the cold. He held on to the cold. When he turned back to Ahsoka, she was curled in the corner, as far away from him as she could get—pressed flush against the wall, tears sliding down her face and looking anywhere but him. Anakin wasn’t an idiot; he knew what happened to young girls on the market, and he’d known what had happened to the Twi’lek slave who threw herself from the Queen’s palace. When they were young, up until they stopped looking young, Anakin knew what happened to them—and it had been part of the plan, the heavy weight of implication. But Ahsoka was never supposed to be out of his sight. It was only supposed to work because she would never be out of his sight. For a second he imagined Ahsoka on Tatooine, her sheet the only shield she had against the world, getting prodded on the scar of an old dog bite, the blemish weighed against her worth, and the thought turned his stomach so harshly he nearly fell back onto the mattress when he sat down. And he knew that she’d just been able to feel his fury, the way he could feel the fear in her now, and that just a minute ago he’d been just another loud, domineering man—just another threat. Just another animal.

Anakin ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “That was—you didn’t need to hear that from me. You didn’t need to—I’m so sorry.”

Ahsoka scrubbed at her eyes. “It was rude of me to ask like that,” she said, quietly.

“That doesn’t mean I get to—that’s not the point. It doesn’t mean I get to do that to you. You’ve been through a lot I don’t know.”

Ahsoka sniffled, a bit, and then resettled herself. She lifted the hem of his cloak and wiped her nose with it, and Anakin scrunched his nose at her, and when she gave him a watery smile he smiled back.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “A real one. We rushed when we put this mission together. It wasn’t designed safely enough for you. It was dangerous, and stupid, and you paid the price. There’s not—I can’t make it up to you. I’m sorry.”

Ahsoka bristled. “I can take it,” she said.

Anakin shook his head. “You’re fourteen, Ahsoka. This isn’t about what you can and can’t do. You’re incredible, you’re phenomenally talented, and if I have anything to say about it, you’ll be the youngest Jedi Knight in two hundred years, because you’re exceptional. But there are things you shouldn’t have to do.”

Ahsoka’s eyes—always such a rich blue, always reminding him of the evening sky—widened. “Exceptional,” she whispered.

Anakin snorted. “Don’t you think I know what exceptional looks like?”

Her eyes were wet, and she grinned, lekku-to-lekku and bright as the sun. She punched him in the shoulder. “Arrogant ass,” she said, and then swiped at her eyes. “You—you really think so? You think that?”

Anakin felt guilt unfurl in his chest. He knew that desperation in her voice, knew it as well as he knew himself, knew it as one of his oldest friends. He twisted on the bed and folded his legs beneath him, so he was facing her. “Can I touch you,” he said, softly.

Ahsoka nodded, and then he reached out and held her shoulders. “I don’t say it often enough,” he said. “But I believe in you, Snips. You were exceptional from day one. I trust you to be—brave. Compassionate. The things that are you, I don’t think you’ll ever lose them. It’s never about that. It’s about there being experiences you shouldn’t have to live.”

The white markings on Ahsoka’s brow furrowed. “But if it helps people—and this time, it did—then shouldn’t I—”

“Don’t give yourself up,” Anakin said. “You’re a priority, too. I failed you. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think you _can_ fail me,” she said, and then she leaned forward and wrapped her thin lean arms around him, warm against his chest even through his robes. As much as Anakin would have liked to control himself, he couldn’t summon the strength, and when he hugged her back he knew it was bruising, and the way his cheek was pressed between her stubby little montrals was desperate, but he couldn’t stop it. His mother had hugged him like this. Thinking about his mother sent fire spiralling through his chest, but it was true, that his mother had hugged him like this, like every touch might be their last—and to think he had lost that, over his years as a Jedi, that he could count on one hand how many times he hugged Ahsoka like this. He’d never hugged Obi-Wan like this—he’d never hugged Obi-Wan before at all.

_I don’t think you can fail me,_ she had said. She believed that. He had failed her before she had known him, he would fail her again; he’d slaughtered them like animals, and he’d slaughtered them as an animal. He knew what he was. Anakin knew he should stand up and walk out and remember that it was the Queen’s love that he was good for, that if anyone would ask him for carnage, it was that he could give. Maybe there was a smarter version of himself who stood up, walked away, and let it burn, and let her burn, and then buried the coals. A version of himself who chose to be a true Jedi a moment longer.

Their training bond—the coveted Master-padawan bond that was the heart of the Order itself—hummed with life, with light, with power, and when Anakin tugged it, it flooded with love. Her love, because he’d never really taught her the finer points of the attachment clause, because he had never wanted to; because he’d been selfish, maybe, because he’d figured a Temple-raised child would know that an emotion as strong as love was strictly prohibited, because he’d been lazy. Love tied a Jedi too close to the galaxy, to the secular. The Force was a jealous thing, permitting love only for itself, so that a Jedi may always be perfectly objective, so that a Jedi may always slide easily into the Force without getting tied down by love for anything else. But in his arms he held a desperate and hurting girl the same way his mother had held a desperate and hurting boy, and blast it all, if he couldn’t give her love, there was nothing he had to offer her, and blast it all, if he didn’t desperately want to offer her something. He let their bond hum with his own love, in turn, and Ahsoka’s arms tightened like a vise.

“There’s only one blessing in Huttese,” Anakin said. “It’s mostly a loveless language.”

Ahsoka hummed. “Wonder why.”

Anakin snickered, and sobered, before continuing. “There’s only the one. But it’s the most important one I can think of. _Luke aahl ali khan._ It means _love walks with you._ When I was a kid we didn’t have anything. Nothing was ours, not even our bodies, and the only thing we had that mattered—that you couldn’t lose—was love. If you have it, and they say _luke aahl ali khan,_ you’ll always have it. It’s always with you. Doesn’t matter who you say it to; parents, children, lovers, siblings, friends, it doesn’t matter. Just that you love them, and that love stays with them. If they matter to you once, they matter to you forever.”

“Oh,” Ahsoka said, in a small voice.

A thrill of fear crawled up Anakin’s spine. This was code-breaking; code-shattering, even, and between the way his life on Tatooine bore down on him like the dogs, and the fact that he was confessing to loving his padawan, he’d all but thrown in even the pretense of adhering to the Jedi way. But he couldn’t shove this back into the rotten pit of things he didn’t think about, the rotten pit of things he refused to think about—the blood on his hands would not share space with this. If there was going to be one untwisted, unfettered piece of himself he gave away, it would be Ahsoka, it would always start with Ahsoka. He was not the Jedi he was supposed to be. He wanted more than that.

_“Luke aahl ali khan,_ Snips,” he said, softly.

Ahsoka pulled out of his arms, scrubbing at her eyes with her palms. “Teach me how to say it,” she said, fiercely. “I want to say it. Perfectly.”

Anakin swallowed, searching her face—but Ahsoka had this steel core to herself that amazed him, unmitigated, raw determination. At fourteen years old her will was indomitable. He nodded, and then said, “I’ll teach you. But first you have to know that—I’m sorry, for what happened, for that mission. If you want to talk about it—I’m not helpful, here, really. But I’ll listen.”

Ahsoka bit her lip. The steel in her faded, just a bit—she was still, of course, only a young girl. But someday that steel would be all of her. “Not tonight,” she said, finally. “My head’s still—spinning. Soon, maybe. Now teach me how to say it.”

Anakin did, walking her over the rough syllables, the dry accent, and he taught his padawan how to say the only blessing he’d ever known. And in the early morning, she said it back it to him, and it was the first time he heard it in eleven years.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ahsoka has some lingering insecurities, maybe, just a little, just a touch, and Obi-Wan is high on painkillers, and Anakin threatens to maim people, which just indicates that he's still pretty much just Anakin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It midnight post Anakin and Ahsoka emotions

Cultural expeditions were the right of every Jedi initiate; Ahsoka had been on one every year until she was apprenticed and officially inducted into the Order. She was lucky, now that she looked back on it, that she was a Togrutan Jedi, because Shaak Ti was one of the most revered Jedi Masters of her age, and she had argued as fiercely as a master of her status could to take the Togrutan Jedi on cultural expeditions to Shili twice a year, for the lunar and solar festivals. Not many other Jedi were of a culture that had such a highly revered member willing to take personal interest in their cultural expeditions. There were only three other Togrutan Jedi at the Temple aside from Ahsoka, and those expeditions had been—lovely, in a way Ahsoka didn’t have the words for. Shili was a beautiful planet, wreathed in deep shadow from the bruncasta canopy, filled with bioluminescent plants and long, elegant, curling lines, so unlike the rigid structures of Coruscant. Baala, Vi, and Y’ven had been her closest friends because of those expeditions, and she’d always thought, in the back of her mind, that maybe if Plo Koon didn’t apprentice her when it was time, maybe Shaak Ti would. She’d hoped that Shaak Ti would. Ahsoka had always revered her; she was tall, and proud, and a powerful Jedi, and she spoke cleanly and clearly and everyone listened to her, and when Ahsoka turned ten and the time came to start thinking about what she would be as a padawan—she always tried to envision what Shaak Ti must have been. Collected, a fluid duelist, who spoke evenly and was trusted by all.

When she looked back on it, now, four years later, she felt small and worthless, because neither Plo Koon or Shaak Ti had apprenticed her. Neither of them had even opted in to view the rising initiates, because neither of them were interested in a padawan at all; Master Plo had apologized to her, saying that the Force had not yet readied him after the loss of his last padawan, but Shaak Ti had maybe never thought twice about her. The second Baala and Vi and Y’ven were apprenticed, they’d all but evaporated from Ahsoka’s life—she hadn’t seen them since. She didn’t even know where to begin to look for them. They’d melted, seamlessly, into the depths of the Order, and those bi-yearly trips had melted away with them, because she was no longer a Togrutan initiate who could just as easily be back on Shili when she was fourteen, she was a Togrutan padawan, who would dedicate her life and soul to the Order itself. But Ahsoka hadn’t felt as close to anyone in the Order as she had when she was on Shili, when Shaak was teaching them all about themselves _—the bruncasta trees on Shili have grown so tall that the uppermost leaves have adapted to take in less oxygen, as they rapidly approach the uppermost barrier of survival,_ she’d said. _That’s why we evolved montrals and lekku, younglings. The canopy of the bruncasta trees blocks out such a massive amount of Shili’s sunlight that we needed to adapt ways to see without light, so our montrals and lekku, our eerkan in our mothertongue, are highly sensitive to vibration. Have you ever noticed that you’re more sensitive to heat and light than your fellow initiates? It’s because we evolved in shadow, younglings. And yet we shine so brightly._

When she looked back on it now, Ahsoka had loved them. She had loved them all. She had scrabbled for the thing they shared, the thing they had in common, their bodies and their faces, and held on with everything she had because she had nothing in common with anyone else. The crèchemasters called her headstrong, they called her obstinate, and she was—too much, in all ways, on all sides. _A handful,_ Master Lori used to say. _Initiate Tano is quite the handful._ Too much for anyone else, so she’d reached for the similarities she could find, and then tried to turn them into ties. She’d been young and impressionable and she’d wanted to be as elegant as Shaak someday, and she’d loved her friends, and she’d loved the effortless way they had been with her; it was a Togrutan gesture of love to touch montral-tips, and every time Ahsoka had seen other Togruta do it on Shili, her heart had filled with desire. She’d tried to screw up the courage to ask Baala, or Vi, or Y’ven, but she’d never managed it, and they’d faded away, all but ghosts to her despite them still being alive, and now she never could. She had loved them; they were hers. But she’d never told them, and she’d never even really had the words to tell them, and they’d walked away and now they’d probably never know. They couldn’t have said it back—they were forbidden from saying it back—but now she found herself wanting them to know, or maybe, at least wanting to know what it would change if she’d mustered the courage.

Initiates were eligible for apprenticeship at age ten. At thirteen, Ahsoka had been dangerously close to aging out of the Order entirely; if the Force had not directed a master to her in four years, she could choose to be returned to her birth parents, be taken as a ward by a third party, or would become a ward of her home planet, but she would never be a Jedi. In all cases she would leave the Order with a stipend until she reached the legal majority age of wherever she resided, but she would never be a Jedi, and she would never be taught the ways of the Force beyond what she had been shown as an initiate. She’d been running out of time, and desperate to prove herself; Baala had been apprenticed first, when Ahsoka was ten, and then next year she’d lost Vi and Y’ven, and become one of the small group of stragglers in her age unit that hadn’t been apprenticed. They’d all been miserable, and none of them had liked each other very much because of it—Ahsoka couldn’t even remember their names. Their crèchemaster had often tried to cheer them up _—oh, come on, younglings, I’ve been doing this for decades! You are a fine group and you will be apprenticed soon enough. You will all be Knights. Look at that Obi-Wan Kenobi, he was very nearly a ward of his home planet and now there’s whispers he’ll be nominated to the Council soon!_

It hadn’t helped much. Then, of course, the war had broken out, and everyone had all but lost hope of being apprenticed to anyone; and then Grandmaster Yoda himself had sent for Ahsoka, Ahsoka Tano, a thirteen-year-old initiate on the cusp of being a wash out, and had told her, _spoken to me, the Force has. A master for you, it has found—but luck, you will need, child. Much luck, indeed._

In one meeting she’d learned that not only would she be a Jedi Padawan, and in the future, a Jedi Knight, that she wouldn’t, that the Force _had_ wanted her, but she would be apprenticed to the one Jedi whose name everyone knew; Anakin Skywalker, who had been too old to be an initiate, too young to be a padawan, but had been too exceptional not to train. She’d seen him before a thousand times, because everyone whispered when he walked by, and he’d been giving dueling demonstrations since he was her age. Everyone knew Anakin Skywalker’s face. He was always embroiled at the center of something, always doing something important and going somewhere important, and she’d even heard that when he was called to meet with the Council, whatever he was doing was so imperative that all twelve members and the Grandmaster met with him. The youngest Jedi Knight in a hundred years, the Chosen One, too, whatever that meant—whenever the masters caught on that the younglings were listening, they quickly shut up about that one. His midichlorian count was the stuff of fantasy; when he gave lightsaber demonstrations with his master, it was like watching a dream, the Force and the lightsaber and the Jedi all blurred lines and became one. His master had killed the first Sith in a thousand years, and been called a Soresu prodigy—and, in one singular moment, that lineage became her lineage. Her master was the Force and the lightsaber and the Jedi all in one. Her grandmaster was the Soresu prodigy who had taught him, the vaunted Sithkiller.

Grandmaster Yoda himself had designated her as Anakin Skywalker’s padawan. Either Ahsoka had been so pathetic they’d been forced to assign her to the best Jedi Knight in the entire Order, from the Grandmaster’s own line, or they thought Ahsoka really could keep up with him, and Ahsoka had been out to prove it’d be the latter. A determination and a fire she’d had to stoke herself, because when she’d first met Anakin, he’d wanted nothing to do with her, had thought she’d slow him down, had tried to shove her off—but this was her one shot. She couldn’t let it go, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t. She would forge whatever similarity had brought them together into a tie.

And then he’d called her exceptional. _You’re incredible, you’re phenomenally talented, and if I have anything to say about it, you’ll be the youngest Jedi Knight in two hundred years,_ he’d said. _Because you’re exceptional._ Ahsoka had committed the words to memory, carved them on the inside of her ribcage. They were like a shield, a defense, that no matter what anyone said about her, that no matter what happened, she was good enough for _Anakin,_ and she would always have that. He’d told her that he believed in her. He was the best Jedi Knight in the entire Order, trained by the best Jedi Master in the entire Order, and he believed in her.

“Go back to the part where you were almost a fucking _wash out,”_ Rex said, gruffly. “Commander, that doesn’t make a lick of sense. You’re one of the best. Why would they do that?”

Ahsoka waved a hand. “Well, _I’m_ over it, because clearly everyone was wrong about me. But, yeah, if you’re not apprenticed by a certain age, you won’t ever be a Jedi. It sucks. I heard it almost happened to Obi-Wan, but I’m pretty sure that crèchemaster was lying to make us feel better.”

One of Rex’s dark eyebrows raised. He had mastered that expression. He almost made Ahsoka wish she had eyebrows, because the expression was so unimpressed it made her giggle. “That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, Commander,” he said.

Ahsoka shrugged. “But, anyway, you’re missing the point, Rex. He believes in me.”

“’Course he does,” Rex said, puffing his chest. “He’s _our_ General, not some half brain-dead planetside idiot. He’s always believed in you, haven’t you met him?”

“He’s never said it!” Ahsoka said. “I don’t know, Rex, he can have real high expectations when he’s your master, okay? He’s never said it. I knew he cared but I didn’t know—as far as Jedi go, he’s, like. Everyone wants to be as good as he is. It’s hard to know if you can impress someone like that.”

Rex crossed his arms. “Earlier statement retracted, then. Maybe he’s a little bit of an idiot. You’re clearly fucking impressive.”  
  


Ahsoka grinned, and then balled up the foil of her ration bar and threw it at Rex’s nose. “Rex, old boy,” she said, “imagine if I were enough of a traitor to tell him you said that. Imagine.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Rex scoffed.

Ahsoka bobbed her head. “Sure I wouldn’t. But it’d be really funny if I did.”

“You fucking loon,” Rex grumbled. “We’ll reach Coruscant today, Commander.”

Ahsoka shrugged. “Yeah. Skyguy said he’d take me to Dex’s. You wanna come with? He wouldn’t care.”

Rex shook his head. “Well, Commander, I’ve got, uh—well, I got—”

Ahsoka wrinkled her nose. Rex only looked sheepish like that when he was about to tell her she couldn’t do something, and there was only one thing Rex did on Coruscant that she couldn’t. “Bly’s on Coruscant, isn’t he.”

Rex grinned, albeit a bit sheepishly. “Listen, the bet’s still on, Commander. Legally I’m obligated to drink him under the table. It’s my job.”

Rex had a habit of insisting everything was his job, from roughhousing with her to sending pictures of what worlds they visited to his brothers back on Kamino; it seemed like an inside joke he shared only with himself.

“It’s not at all legal,” Ahsoka said. “You’re not obligated to do anything. It’s totally not your job.”

“It is, actually. It’s my calling in life to make sure Bly knows his place,” Rex said, haughtily.

Ahsoka pulled a brow higher. It was a testament to how good Rex had gotten at reading her expressions that he said, wolfishly, “Bly’s place is puking under the table and painting a gundark decal on my speeder when he loses, Commander, and you know it.”

Ahsoka snickered. “You know what, you show him. Show him what the 501st is made of. And your speeder will look sick, Bly paints the best gundarks in the Grand Army.”

Rex raised a fist, and she raised hers to bump it—it was always strange seeing him in the black shirt and pants that were issued to all clones to wear outside of the armor, but it always, invariably, made her think about what would happen to him after the war. She tried not to think about what would happen to the clones after they were decommissioned, or where they’d go. His knuckles were rough as sandpaper, but his hands were always warm.

“I’ll bring you back something from Dex’s,” she said. “Something greasy. Skyguy says he used to do that for Obi-Wan, when Obi-Wan would get into drinking contests with Quinlan Vos.”

“General Kenobi’s Stewjonian, right? Stewjonians have that—thing, or whatever. Can’t remember. They’re supposed to be good at drinking, though.”

Ahsoka bobbed her head. “He’s Stewjonian, yeah. Anakin says he tried to outdo Obi-Wan once and still doesn’t remember what happened that night.”

Rex laughed, a loud, braying thing—he was one of the only soldiers in the 501st who treated her like just another soldier, like just another comrade. A lot of the time they were more delicate around her, and whether it was because she was younger on the barest technicality, or their commanding officer, or because she was a girl, she didn’t know. Only Rex laughed that bellowing laugh with her. It used to unnerve her—Jedi were never loud—but now it was comforting.

“The General can’t hold his liquor for shit,” Rex said. “Best Jedi in the Order, and he’s out four shots in. Ridiculous. And then I have to drag his heavy ass around.”

Ahsoka smirked. “I’m sure I’ll be better, one day.”

Rex raised a brow. “You’re a third his size, Commander. You have some growing to do first.”

Ahsoka rolled her eyes, and then reached behind her on the bed—Rex’s bed, technically, although she was sitting on it with her legs folded up, and Rex was sprawled on the ground in front of her—and threw a pillow at his face.

Rex let it hit him, laughing. “It’s my job not to lie, Commander! You’re a pipsqueak. Small pint. Fun size.”

“Togruta are naturally tall,” Ahsoka said, hopefully. “I’ll be taller than you, just you wait. Don’t fuck with me, Captain, or I’ll kick your ass.”

Rex had flopped back on the floor and said, “Yeah, you—you probably could, Little Commander.”

She’d spent most of the evening pestering Rex, after waking up on Anakin’s cot. She’d fallen asleep on him early that morning, after—after she’d managed to say it back, the _luke aahl ali khan,_ the blessing he’d taught her. She’d cried while doing it. Anakin had mopped up her tears with the sleeve of his robe, gentle in a way he wasn’t often. Soft in a way he wasn’t often. He was all the things she was sensitive to; heat and light, bright and burning. Always on the move for something, somewhere. He was kind in a brusque and fast way. Anakin reminded her often of the sharp-toothed beasts, the ones that prowled anywhere and everywhere, spurred always by a kind of hunger, never without something to search for. She’d known he’d cared about her but he’d always cared about her in a way that was sharp-edged and rough, the way he did just about everything; ruthless, bearing down on a person with all the intensity of a bristling fire, a sharp and sarcastic way of talking to her. Something had changed between them, shifted, but she’d never in her life been more certain of where she stood with him, and the bond between them in the Force was like a long coronal ejection trapped in an electrical field tying them together, pure sunlight that was warm without burning, bright without hurting. _Exceptional._ She didn’t mind the softness. She didn’t mind it at all.

But she’d given him some time away from her. It’d taken her a couple months, in the beginning, to adjust to the fact that Anakin was more of a loner than she was; there were times where Anakin just flat-out didn’t want to talk to anyone, anywhere, no matter who they were. He wanted to be alone with his droids or his ships or even more alone than that, and he could get mean, if he didn’t have that time. Ahsoka had always liked herself a lot better around people, and Rex was the same way as her, for all his apparent gruffness. He liked his clone brothers and he liked his General and what was the point of breathing, if it wasn’t always shared—so she’d picked up a habit of pestering Rex, and Rex pestered her back. Times like these, when they didn’t have the rest of the 501st breathing down their necks, they relied on each other.

They played holochess for a while, after Ahsoka had recounted her conversation with Anakin the night before—Rex was her best friend, and she was too excited not to tell someone—and then they’d gone hunting for the workout chambers included for the frigate staff, and practiced hand-to-hand a bit. It devolved into technically-unfeasible wrestling, naturally, as it always did when Anakin wasn’t barking tips from the sideline _—Snips, you’re faster, not stronger, stop trying to hit him harder than he can hit you—_ and then they snuck out and stole some special fruit-flavored ration bars from the mess hall. Nicer than their standard issue, for sure, but somehow the jaha fruit flavored ones could still stain skin, like the fruit itself. Rex learned that the hard way.

Not long after that, Anakin had commed her to flatly tell her that they were going to pull Obi-Wan out of sedation in about ten minutes, because they’d land on Coruscant in a couple hours and Obi-Wan would be going into a bacta tank as soon as the sedatives worked out of his system. _He’s higher than the stratosphere,_ Anakin had said, and delight had lurked into his voice, and Ahsoka bolted for Obi-Wan’s private healing quarters. She was, after all, an opportunist, and for all that she had seen Obi-Wan injured, Ahsoka had rarely seen painkillers affect him in any such way.

Anakin let her in, but his head was still turned to Obi-Wan. “Our toaster works just damn fine,” he said, loudly, before turning to her. His eyes were—soft, folded gently at the corners. He’d always had a deceptively soft face. “Hi,” he said.

Ahsoka couldn’t help the wellspring of emotion in her chest, and she let it flood the bond, too, when she leaned forward and hugged him. “I’ve been annoying Rex all day,” she said.

“I figured,” he said, warmly, a hand ghosting down the back of her head—gentle, kind, overwhelmingly so, even if it was a barely-there touch. She could feel herself leaning into it, like a flower chasing sunlight. She would be embarrassed of how desperate she felt if she hadn’t been in Anakin’s arms this morning, and hadn’t felt the tightness in how he held on to her.

“Our toaster is not at all functional,” Obi-Wan said, loudly. “Get over here at once. I have a bone to pick with you, padawan, you turned our toaster into a flamethrower and when I attempted to ground you, you went lockjaw racing—get over here! At once!”

Anakin pulled away from Ahsoka. His eyes were bright. “He’s on—arkephalin, or something. I don’t know what it’s called, exactly. It’s something Stewjonian, so his system doesn’t just fight it off. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen, c’mon, watch.”

He led her over to Obi-Wan’s bedside, where he’d pulled up another chair for her. An Emdee droid was hovering over the IV pole and tapping something into a datapad, but there was no clone medic present—with an Emdee, though, there didn’t really need to be, not if Obi-Wan was already pulled out of sedation and just waiting for those drugs to flush out. Ahsoka settled in for the show.

“I see you’ve brought reinforcements, you bastard padawan,” Obi-Wan sniffed. “Reinforcements won’t save you. Lockjaw racing, of all the things—lockjaw racing! How uncouth. Uncouth!”

“Bastard padawan’s new,” Anakin said, gleefully. He leaned over to Ahsoka, smelling somehow like motor oil despite having been by Obi-Wan’s bedside all day, and said, “Lockjaw racing happens in the lowest levels of Coruscant. It’s like mushing, but you use a team of programmed lockjaw droids. Usually they have gunners on the back.”

“Interesting.”

“I used to do it blindfolded. Crowd pleasing is important, you know.”

Obi-Wan, disheveled and still pale as white bone, marred with bruises and burns from the shock collar, his normally neat hair a ginger bird’s nest on top of his head, still somehow managed to look down his nose at Anakin. “Crowd pleasing! Useless. What about master pleasing? I would certainly love to be pleased, you little hellion. Reinforcements won’t save you here. I am airing grievances. Justified grievances. Ahsoka, tell him my grievances are justified. Tell him, I demand it.”

“I don’t know what they are,” Ahsoka said. “I think you should tell me in excruciating detail about them, all of them. So I can know if they’re justified.”  
  


Obi-Wan huffed. “Very well. Anakin sees fit to leave his boots in the hallway. If I go to Dex’s without him he will eat my leftovers without asking. He steals my socks, which I’ll have you know, I ask our quartermaster for those wool socks very specifically, I have high expectations. As you can see, I have all the grievances that are possible. I hold them, with my own hands.”

“I should have known that the first thing Obi-Wan would do when high as hell would be to complain about me,” Anakin said, smugly. “I knew I annoyed him more than he ever let on.”

“I used to break things specifically so you would have something to do,” Obi-Wan said. “You ran me ragged. I had to get you up at—can you believe this, Ahsoka _—five in the morning,_ standard, every day, because you wouldn’t sit still in class so I had to exhaust you first. I still get up at five in the morning, you know, waiting for you. You’d toddle out, this small blond head, announcing that today would be the day you defeated me. Sometimes I feel I am always waiting for you.”

Ahsoka grinned. “Small blond head, huh?”

“He was the sweetest little moppet you’d ever meet,” Obi-Wan said, pressing his face into his hands. “The sweetest little hellion you could find. He would announce that he would defeat me and then ask me if I wanted milk for my tea, oh, he was so—he was so wrong about tea. The worst taste in tea. He wanted milk and sugar with tea flavoring, how terrible.”

“This is a set-up. He’s lying. He’s never thought I was sweet,” Anakin said.

This offended Obi-Wan immensely, because he struggled to sit up while Anakin leaped out of his chair and practically held him down, all the while viciously saying, “You were the _sweetest creature!_ I didn’t know what to do with you, and you were _so small!_ The day you got taller than me is the day my life ended. I’m not sure why you simply haven’t lowered me into my grave. The sweetest little beast. You would steal my cloaks. I am—why did you stop stealing my cloaks?”

The look on Anakin’s face was hard, and, still, somehow gentle. Maybe the softness just lived in him now that he had showed it to her. He looked like he was torn between throttling Obi-Wan and hugging him. “You told me to get my own,” he said, roughly.

Obi-Wan waved a hand. “That is just a thing I said. I only say things. I am always saying things. Qui-Gon used to tell me I spoke simply to hear myself talk and simply to let everyone around me know they should never converse with me, ever, and I do think he maybe had a point. I always loved seeing you huddling in a cloak that was too big for you, you were so—you should have kept taking them. I demand it. You bastard padawan. How dare you!”  
  


Ahsoka was grinning lekku-to-lekku. “Skyguy,” she said. “I think this might be the most Obi-Wan I’ve ever seen him.”

Anakin looked at her, eyes sharp. “I’m not—so sure,” he said. “He’s a little too nice.”

“A little too nice?” she said. “He’s called you a bastard at least twice, just that I’ve heard. Just admit it, even someone as cranky as Obi-Wan thought you were a sweet little moppet.”

Anakin snorted. “Absolutely, no, he did not. One time I shaved off half of Obi-Wan’s hair while he was sleeping because I was mad at him. I am _not_ sweet.”

“I thought that was a _prank!”_ Obi-Wan shrieked. Shrieked, genuinely, his voice taking on a high and clear note of desperation. “You were _angry?_ I thought you were just being obstinate. You’re always obstinate, I think it’s just your face sometimes, but then I can never really tell because you are also saying something obstinate. I thought that was a prank!”

“You thought it was a _prank,”_ Anakin said. “When I shaved half your stupid mullet off?”

“You were always playing tricks. How was I to know that you were angry, instead of, well, obstinate,” Obi-Wan said.

Ahsoka held up a hand. “Back it up. You shaved Obi-Wan’s head in his sleep? How did he not—”

“Because Master Quinlan had challenged him to a drinking contest, and he would be out for the next twelve hours, and it maybe wasn’t my finest moment,” Anakin said.

Obi-Wan snorted. “Master Quinlan. Master _Quinlan!_ You are not nearly on a first-name basis with that, that—he irritates me, padawan, and I will not have you on a first-name basis with him. It irritates me. Cease this at once, I demand it.”

Something in Anakin flipped like a switch, because the sunlight in him turned to fire and raining ash almost instantly. “You _demand_ it, Master,” he said, acidly, but Obi-Wan plowed forward.

“I demand!” he said, loudly. “Demands are always made of me. I have to demand of you. How many times—how many times did I stand before that council, trying to, trying to mitigate how keenly they looked at you? You were just—a sweet little beast. A sweet little limpet. Always they wanted more from you. I could only—I could only lower their asks so much. I had no one to defend me, or you. Only—the demands. From Qui-Gon, from everyone. Oh, Force, he was right, truly I am not worth speaking to.”

“Demands,” Anakin said, slowly.

Ahsoka threw a hand out on Anakin’s arm, and the tension melted out of him—if she’d known before that would work, she’d have been doing it this entire time—and then said, loudly, “Obi-Wan! Give me all the dirt on the Jedi Council you know.”

She remembered, like black oil in her memory, how Anakin had twisted so sharply last night, how she could feel his fury become him. The last thing Obi-Wan needed, while this indisposed, was Anakin snapping at him—and if there was one thing she could trust about Obi-Wan, it was his capacity to be annoyed by everything around him. And, maybe, Ahsoka was more than a little curious to see if the Jedi Council really was the united group they said they were, the decisions they passed down made in perfect, unanimous tandem. Maybe she really wanted to know if they were just like the rest of the Jedi, or if they truly were above it all. If Obi-Wan himself was above it all, or if he was just this, the injured and prone man lying on the medical cot, rambling nearly incoherently about a padawan he’d already Knighted like he was still in training.

Obi-Wan’s eyes brightened like it was the day he’d been waiting for all his life. “One of these days I will pour a cup of caff directly down Ki-Adi-Mundi’s front, and I will have no regrets and I will not apologize,” he said, savagely. “The man is a fool of a strategist. Everything he says, I disagree with it. Irritating beyond all belief. You know how he criticized the Felucia campaign, padawans? He said the air strike came in too late—the air strike! He criticized the air strike! I could have thrown something at him. How he survived Grandmaster Yoda’s tutelage with such—dilapidated—cognition, I will never—and the wives! The wives. I know for a fact that he’s been asked to provide child support and hasn’t, though the council would obviously ratify such a motion, if the council would ratify his wives in the first place—by the Force!”

Anakin was staring at him, eyes wide. “So this is what he does, internally,” he said, in wonder. “All he does is _bitch.”_  
  


“This is incredible,” Ahsoka said. “Obi-Wan, I’ve never asked this of you before and I probably never will again, but I need you to complain a lot more.”  
  


He did. In the three hours it took from then, to the point they landed, Obi-Wan regaled them with endless amounts of—drama, really, petty fights the Council had over the dumbest of things, and Obi-Wan described in detail the various objects he had wanted to throw at people. It was mystifying, that the Council that seemed so high and mighty were as ridiculous as any group of Jedi, normal despite their prescience, that all of Shaak Ti’s elegance could evaporate in a second if Oppo Rancisis suggested that she was maybe _too fond_ of some of the clones she worked with. But more than that, it was comforting to know that—after Zygerria, Obi-Wan, battered and bleeding, had stood straight-backed like even his pain couldn’t touch him. Ahsoka had felt like she’d crawled out of Zygerria slathered in oil and a dirt bled into her that she couldn’t scrub off, eyes that followed her even lightyears away. Obi-Wan had looked for all the world like nothing had happened to him, despite everything that clearly did. He was so strong sometimes that it seemed ineffable, and sometimes he directed all of that strength into this—scathing verbal beating, effortlessly, like he somehow wasn’t aware of all the power he commanded and just how intimidating he could be. The vaunted Sithkiller himself. But Ahsoka always hoped that, if you could crack Obi-Wan Kenobi open, he stuck around her and Anakin because he was fond of them, and that indomitable strength didn’t make him indestructible, that all of his alternate nitpicking and distance was a strange kind of caring. She’d always hoped that Obi-Wan was kinder than he’d ever let on before, and more human than he’d ever let her know. And she was right, to hope, because he placed a hand and called her _extraordinarily gifted_ the moment after he’d called her _a strange little leech I’m not sure I want to get rid of,_ and Ahsoka thought, personally, that was maybe just how Obi-Wan offered his affection. She hoped. She wasn’t sure. Obi-Wan was hard to read even when he was drugged to the gills, but at least one takeaway from his nearly incoherent rambling was that he was far more universally irritated by everyone and everything than he’d ever let on, and it was really kind of funny, given that you liked him.

“Sweet little beast,” Anakin said, lowly, as they walked through the service halls to the boarding ramp—they used the service halls because the main halls were flooded with travelling wounded soldiers. They’d been chased out of the room by the medics, who were now undergoing the process of switching Obi-Wan over to the Halls of Healing, where he’d be prepared for submersion into a bacta tank.

“I have no idea what that means,” she said.

Anakin shook his head. “He’s never said it to me before. I have no idea where he got it. Fuck if I know what it means. Force, that was terrifying.”

Ahsoka giggled. “No, it was amazing. He called you a moppet, like, eighteen times.”

Anakin’s nose wrinkled. “I was not a moppet. And I wasn’t sweet. I bit the Temple dentist and Obi-Wan had to apologize to him every day for weeks, and he refused to work with me again.”

Ahsoka’s eyes widened. “You—bit the Temple dentist?”

Anakin scrubbed the back of his neck. “I did—things. Don’t ask. I don’t really know what it was about either.”

She desperately, desperately wanted to know more, but there was a strange tension in Anakin that reminded her of his outburst; _I lived it for ten years, it’s everything I know._ Zygerria had ripped something open. She didn’t want to remember Zygerria. Not when she was still thinking about Obi-Wan calling her a _strange little leech._

They split up when they landed at the Temple. He’d told her to go prep the speeder—his favorite one the Temple owned, the candy-colored red one with the convertible hood—because he was going to bother the healers for a bit, and to wait for him. Ahsoka was starving, and half-tempted to go without him—she knew well enough what Anakin liked—but she waited, curled up in the passenger’s seat because she knew Anakin would have an endless amount to say if she waited in the pilot’s seat.

When he found her, he jogged through the Temple hangar, and then swung easily over the speeder’s door, settling in beside her. He looked harried, like he’d somehow found time to run a mile. Anakin fished around in the pocket of his cloak, and then pulled out a smooth, pale riverstone.

“When I was a kid, Obi-Wan gave me this,” he said. “Because Qui-Gon had given it to him. It meant a lot to him, and it means a lot to me. But now it’s yours.”

Anakin dropped the stone in her hand like it was nothing more than a rock, instead of three generations of master-to-padawan tradition. “Oh,” she said, quietly. “I’ll—I’ll protect it. Thank you.”

They felt like weak words. Three generations of master-to-padawan tradition, and all she could say was a measly _thank you—_ but Anakin dipped his head like she’d sworn to something powerful, and gunned the speeder’s engine.

Dex wasn’t at the diner, but it was the middle of the night, they couldn’t well have expected him to be. It was open, though, for them—they were friends of Dex’s, mostly because of Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan would never explain how that had happened—and they settled into a booth across from each other. She knew he was going to push. There wasn’t an hour that passed where Anakin didn’t push some issue, some way or another.

“How’re you feeling,” he said, mildly, like it wasn’t a loaded blaster of a question.

Ahsoka shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot better than I was. You helped. Laughing at Obi-Wan helped.”

“I’m glad,” he said, quietly.

Ahsoka looked around the diner—dimly lit, because they were the only patrons. Their waitress was in the back, no doubt rightfully complaining about customers this late, and the hustle and bustle of the place that had come to signify just as much as the stone that weighed so heavily in her pocket was entirely absent. It was eerie. Or maybe she had come back different.

“He wanted me,” she said, quietly. She dropped her eyes to the table. “He wanted me. You don’t get it. No one’s ever wanted me. It’s not like—like that. But as a Jedi. I didn’t get chosen, to be a padawan. I was assigned. I would’ve aged out of the Order if I wasn’t assigned to you. No one picked me for anything. And I know you—” and she stopped, and lowered her voice, even if they weren’t at the Temple, “—I know you love me. I love you too. I said it back. But that doesn’t mean you chose me.”

Ahsoka risked a glance at Anakin’s face. It was wretched. “Don’t say anything,” she said, because she could see his jaw working. “Let me finish.”

Anakin blew out a long, shaky breath. “Okay,” he said, unsteadily.

“But the Zygerrian slaver wanted me on sight. And I know why, I’m not—I’m not stupid. I know he was—I know he was looking for—” she stopped, and sucked in a breath, and tried to wrangle the fierce and howling thing in her chest into something becoming of a Jedi. “And I hated him. With everything. I wanted him gone, because he—he mocked me, he shocked me when I tried to stand up for myself, and he—he said things. About me. But I kept thinking that—I know it’s messed up. But I kept thinking that at least _he_ wanted me. At least he’d picked me out of a line-up and _—blast it.”_

She swiped at her eyes furiously. They were burning like coals. “It sounds so terrible when I say it out loud,” she said, miserably.

Anakin’s eyes were closed. The longer it took him to respond, the more she considered getting up and walking out and not coming back, but finally he said, “I knew how much I could sell for,” lowly. “I knew. I still know. Sometimes I can guess how much I would sell for now. It’d be a lot. I’m proud of it being a lot. Sometimes you want terrible things.”

Ahsoka sucked in a breath. _I’m proud of it being a lot._ “It makes me feel dirty. He said—things. About me. About what I look like. It feels—it feels dangerous, to be me, because now it’s, it’s that I know what people could be thinking.”

“If anyone looks at you wrong, I’ll rip their eyes out,” Anakin said, mildly. Casually, the Force chiming with the truth of it; he meant it, heart and soul, no exaggeration, just naked honesty.

“That doesn’t mean they didn’t look in the first place,” Ahsoka said, sharply. “That doesn’t mean I don’t need you more, then—then the revenge would.”

Anakin’s face crumpled again, and he muttered out a quiet apology before their waitress swung back by and dropped their drinks on the table. Ahsoka took a cautious sip of hers while Anakin drummed his knuckles on the table.

“I get angry,” he said, after a while. “That’s an understatement, actually. I don’t get angry. I _am_ angry. It’s not helpful and I know it. I’m sorry.”

Ahsoka shrugged. “I knew you’d probably get angry at—him. But I’m _here._ I don’t need you to go chasing off on—revenge, even theoretical.”

Anakin’s brows furrowed. “What _do_ you need?”

Ahsoka sipped her drink again. It was the first time he’d ever asked her that and it’d been about what was going on in her chest, beneath her sternum; the first time he’d ever asked her what she needed to be herself, because it wasn’t, exactly, the Jedi way. His eyes were soft again. Strange, how he could go from swearing to gouge out eyes candidly, to that softness. “That molten Corellian lava brownie thing,” Ahsoka said.

Anakin huffed a quiet laugh. “Done. What else?”

She wondered what kind of a response she would get if she asked him to lay himself bare enough, to go through everything he needed to soothe the rage in him, like there was a bullet point list for it. It would, undoubtedly, be catastrophic. He’d be _furious._ “The hugs are nice,” she said, sheepishly. “It makes me feel—like a person. Not like a thing in a cage being stared at.”

Anakin fiddled with the paper wrapping from his straw. “I can do that,” he said.

Ahsoka worried her lip. “I know you don’t like this sort of thing. But I do. I like talking like this. I need it, I think, and—I know you love me. But I didn’t know I was good enough. I needed that.”

“Ahsoka,” he said, quietly, wretchedly. “I’ll—every day. Every day, Snips. You _are_ good enough. You _always_ were.”

She shuddered. She might not ever get tired of those words. “Thanks,” she said.

Anakin took a long sip of his drink. “You deserved better,” he said, clearing his throat. “You deserved better than not knowing that. You deserved better than hearing what you did from a monster like that. You deserved—better than a cage.”

He was nothing but a flat glass plane in the Force; unreadable, unreachable. But if he had been open to her, she had the sinking feeling that he’d be more light and heat, more uncontestable, unconquerable rage. But he’d leashed it just for her. That meant something.

Ahsoka ducked her head. “Yeah,” she said, and for the first time since Zygerria, she felt the cloying smell of rot in the back of her throat ease, just some. Replaced, maybe, by Anakin, and the fact that he genuinely always smelled like motor oil somehow. “You deserved better than a price tag, Skyguy.”

She didn’t want to think about it, the price tag. She didn’t want to know how often Anakin had weighed all of the things that the Temple had gossiped about—his skill with a lightsaber, his skill with the Force, his skill in a cockpit or with a hydrospanner, his status as a prodigy—and assigned numerical values to it all. She didn’t want to know it was something he did in the first place, but she had a feeling she was the only one who did, and he deserved at least one person to recognize how sad that was.

“Yeah,” he said, tightly. “Guess we—we both deserved something better.”

It was a similarity. It was a tie. Brutal, and painful, but it was a tie all the same. Things lightened after that, they slid back into bickering, but when they left Anakin draped his cloak around her shoulders and it smelled so much like him that she fell asleep on the way back to the Temple. Ahsoka only had bleary memories of him walking her back to their shared quarters, but the ones where she slithered onto their couch, and he draped a blanket over her and pressed a warm kiss to her forehead—those were clearer. They were so much clearer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one got very long lol. High on painkillers Obi-Wan is my new favorite Obi-Wan to write, also I'm really enjoying the idea that Anakin and Ahsoka solve emotional problems the second Obi-Wan's down for the count. 
> 
> I pretty much invented Ahsoka's backstory, lol. Because she's 13 in TCW, and assigned to Anakin, which is not how previous canon had done that; at 13, Obi-Wan was almost sent to Jedi Service Corps TM because he was Too Old To Padawan, which you'll notice I did away with because the idea that the Jedi have a Congrats You Were Shit division is a little too terrible for me to willingly include. I'll concede the Jedi did a lot pretty badly, I will not willingly believe they had a Congrats You Were Shit division of Assigned Occupation: Farmer. Obi-Wan's various emotional damages stemming from his weird padawanship, and everything Qui-Gon was, is baked into my reading of him now, but that would also mean Ahsoka's story reads pretty similar to his by nature of what canon gives us. So unfortunately baby padawan and grandmaster have a sad amount in common, and Anakin's just there in the middle being so ludicrously special at everything except for, like, morals, and anger management. Neither Obi-Wan or Ahsoka were willingly chosen, and Anakin's like, literally the Chosen One, it's his destiny to be chosen for shit. Very funny dynamic. I would like Obi-Wan and Ahsoka to talk about it but Obi-Wan got his ass kicked, and he has to get his ass less kicked so he, too, can join in the awkward emotional conversation times, of which Anakin needs to have. Like. A million. 
> 
> I also invented the Shili headcanons, the other Togruta padawans, and her relation to Shaak Ti, because, like, why not. It's SW fanfic, my job here is to hallucinate things vividly. It's midnight here, please forgive the weird end note, I wrote this whole thing in one sitting and I'm mildly fried.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the thrilling sequel to Obi-Wan being high, Anakin gets drunk. Or, more accurately, his wife gets him drunk. The people in charge of Ahsoka are very responsible and they do responsible things. Like cry at their wives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It midnight post the Anakin and Padme emotions

Anakin and Ahsoka slipped into something of a routine, in the week and a half Obi-Wan was submerged in bacta.

A week and a half in a bacta tank would even out to roughly two weeks of recovery; even with the advanced healing of the Halls, a medical coma was a medical coma all the same, and no matter how much Anakin may have resented the extended grounding, Obi-Wan sorely needed it. It would, then, be the longest Anakin had stayed in his Knights’ quarters since he’d lost his mother and his right arm and married his wife—he’d taken them over a year ago, and still they were foreign to him. It hadn’t been so long ago that he’d found a year to be an achingly long time. But the frenzy of war had dulled it all. It all slid by. It was all inconsequential. Still all the mechanical parts and tool sets he’d collected over the years were bound in crates and pushed against the wall. His rooms were probably even more foreign to Ahsoka, who had been there only long enough to move her possessions in before the Grandmaster had accompanied her to Christophsis, and she’d only ever stayed there a handful of times since. It was nothing like the well-worn feeling of Obi-Wan’s Knights’ quarters, the same ones Anakin had lived in for ten years, the same ones where they’d forged whatever it was that tied them together. He remembered every dent and smudge and burn and crack of those apartments, scars and bruises from the battle that was whatever he was to Obi-Wan, and whatever Obi-Wan was to him. But Obi-Wan had been Mastered in the same ceremony Anakin had been Knighted, and then shuffled off to the Masters’ quarters, and then he’d been exalted to the Council not long after that, and been shuffled off to the Council’s wing just off the Council chambers themselves, and the place they’d become Master and padawan was reassigned and Anakin and Ahsoka had become Master and padawan everywhere and nowhere at once. Somewhere between he’d lost something, and in a lifetime of cataloguing all of his losses, it was the first time he couldn’t name what it was he’d lost.

They slipped into a routine in their foreign territory, the night after their visit to the diner. Ahsoka had collapsed on the couch, and Anakin had left her, hiding out in his room to sort through his box of processors—a collection he’d intended for a project he couldn’t remember any of the details of, anymore, and now they were flat and useless and he needed to figure out where to put them or what to do with them. Easier to clean the dust off of displaced and broken parts, than to think about Ahsoka huddling across from him, small even for all her strength, words like _I didn’t know I was good enough_ and _it makes me feel dirty_ stretching between them. But in her subconscious state, their bond—the way it had strengthened so it no longer felt like a quiet string of light, but the full blinding power of Tatooine at double noon—had reached for him, her nightmares driving her just as blindly to seek safety. Had reached for him the way he would’ve crawled to his mom, when he was small and the world pressed in on them on all sides, reached for him the way his mother had when she’d just wanted to know he was alive, but—through the Force itself. Ahsoka had all the power of the Force at her fingertips and she’d used it to reach for him. _Stunned_ was just a word, next to everything he’d felt. Without thinking, just as blindly, he’d sat with his eyes closed and a mucky rag in one hand and a broken processor in another and reached back, all of the power of the Force at his fingertips and he used it just to reach for her.

The training bond between Masters and padawans was, primarily, to teach; an easy way for a Master to demonstrate to a student how to catch and release the flow of the Force, how to navigate it. It was the most sacred teaching instrument of the Jedi, the bond between Master and padawan sanctified by the Force itself and the bedrock of all life at the Temple. To use it as a form of attachment, to flood it with feeling the way he and Ahsoka had been doing since their conversation on the frigate, was practically heretical and just begging for censure—the whole point was that the bond would be one thin tendril, one small pale root tying the Master and the padawan as a guide, one small candle to guide one small padawan through the vastness of the Force. It was the job of the padawan to find the way with only the candle. It was the most important work of all Jedi padawans. A training bond was a tie, but it wasn’t a tie meant to bind, and only an attachment in the loosest sense, mean to be severed when a padawan was Knighted. Anakin and Obi-Wan had never severed theirs; Obi-Wan had requested not to, on account that Anakin had been Knighted without Obi-Wan requesting his Trials, and then Knighted without Obi-Wan requested it, and he remained concerned whether Anakin was ready. A Master couldn’t revoke a Knighting, but a Master could do the next best thing, and Obi-Wan had done it. The Grandmaster had ratified the choice. Anakin’s blood boiled with fury even thinking about it, but they never used it—it was half-severed from disuse, sore like a bruise in the back of his mind. Atrophied.

Ahsoka had reached for him blindly, barely conscious, looking for—comfort, safety, a completely wordless brush of contact. It was not how the training bond was supposed to be used. Obi-Wan had guided Anakin through forming the bond with Ahsoka, and he’d outright said that Anakin would have some sense of Ahsoka’s consciousness when it was strong enough, but he should never reach for and he should never latch on. He’d implied it was dangerous, but never explained further, but then—Anakin’s heart had throbbed, her fear and loneliness striking him like a blade, so he’d closed his eyes and settled into the cross-legged meditation pose Obi-Wan had taught him on his first day at the Temple. He cleared his mind of anything other than Ahsoka, and the piece of himself that was tied to her, the piece of each other that they shared; it was no small, thin, pale slip of light, the way his and Obi-Wan’s had been at its strongest. If it were a root, it was a root of the bruncasta trees on Shili that brushed the barrel of the sky, roots that stretched for miles and were several times his height—utterly unshakeable. If it were a light, it was the blinding double sunlight of Tatooine that turned the sand to fire, light that burned the sky and consumed the earth—utterly implacable. Because, at the end of things, that was maybe what they were together: unstoppable. He’d barreled through enough Separatist lines with Ahsoka impossibly, incredibly still at his side, and she’d grin at him like she was barely breaking a sweat, and—exceptional. Ahsoka had always been exceptional. They’d kept using it, since their shared blessings, and he’d known, logically, that it would get stronger, that the use of the Force was like a muscle and the more practice, the more strength a connection to it would grow. He’d known, every time he’d reached for her just to know she was there, and she’d reached back, that they were playing a dangerous game, and it had floored him anyway when she could use it in her subconscious. It had floored him more that his instinct had been to _tug,_ and he’d followed through, and a couple minutes later Ahsoka ducked her head in his doorway and said, wondrously, _I think you woke me up._

_I think I did,_ he’d answered, similarly enraptured, and—it had been so simple to throw the Code over his shoulder at Varykino, so far away from the Temple. But in the Temple walls, using the Force in ways and for reasons he’d been strictly forbidden to—to reach for it with love, the height of passion—it felt unspeakably dangerous. There were no Masters for this. There were no guides, no rules, no limits, nothing but the distance between him and Ahsoka and the power that flowed through them both that could close it.

It was completely thrilling. Somehow it reminded him of racing—open, flat desert, the guttural scream of the engines, nothing but open sand and open sky and the feeling that if he were free, he would race over the horizon and never stop. Let the adrenaline rule him, outrun the dogs and the blood behind him. No guides, no rules, no limits, nothing but distance. It was completely thrilling.

Ahsoka had settled beside him on the floor, for a while, but her shoulders were slumped and she was clearly tired—teenage Togruta, he knew, needed more sleep even than teenage humans, a fact which made half of Anakin’s life a constant battle—and he’d jerked his head at his bed and said, _sleep, I’ll keep watch._ And then she’d blinked at him, her eyes just barely reflected the yellow light in the hallway from the open door, and said, _you need sleep, too, Skyguy, you idiot._ Somehow he’d gotten roped into laying with his back pressed against his headboard and Ahsoka’s head pressed against his chest, her hand fisted in his robes, her lekku twitching here and there in her sleep. There was something so much lighter in him when she was there. He didn’t know how to describe it, but he didn’t sleep the whole night—his sleep was poison, and this was so much lighter than that, this was almost like racing over the horizon—and instead stared at the ceiling, thinking shattered thoughts, thinking that he could have been doing this a year ago, if she had needed it this much. If he had known _he’d_ needed it this much. If he had known that the fear of watching her eyes go cold and her body go slack could be starved out by the rise and fall of her chest while she slept, safely, right next to him, blast it all, he would have started this a year ago, blast it all, if he’d remembered what it had felt like to relax with his mother like this when they had the chance—he would have kept it close. Would have kept her close. There was so much he had forgotten.

The morning after, they stopped by the barracks to drop off leftovers for Rex—his strong captain who had been reduced to moaning beneath regulation blankets thanks to a hangover, but had come out of the other side having kicked Bly’s ass—and then it became routine. They didn’t talk about it, but it was the one thing Ahsoka didn’t seem to need to talk about. The rest she told him in gasped whispers after she jerked awake from one dream or another, or when a shadow passed her face at breakfast _—I never knew that someone could have that much power over me,_ or _I don’t feel safe, sometimes, even though that’s stupid, I’m a Jedi._ Anakin’s responses were terrible. He’d never had such conversations in his life. He could only think black and rotten thoughts, _I never knew someone could choose not to have that much power over me,_ or _I’m starting to think I never felt safe, and I’m a Jedi, too._ He didn’t know how to say them. He didn’t think they would help. But he learned that there was a difference between Ahsoka talking about something, and Ahsoka talking through something, and sometimes the only response she wanted from him was for him to press a kiss to the space between her montrals. Those were the early mornings. After breakfast, Ahsoka would start in on her classwork—she had so much time for field experience, but so little for studying, which was roughly the opposite of what Anakin’s years as a padawan had been. It was a hard adjustment to make, because he’d learned that Ahsoka was more than a little restless when there was time enough to be bored, but even that had a routine. Anakin sprawled on the floor with a new box of broken parts while she sprawled on the couch with her work, and he threw a bolt at her head every time he caught her focus drifting. He’d always wondered what it would have been like, to be her Master when they weren’t war-bound—and as much as the sickly burn of war released the pressure behind his sternum, and as much as he relished stalking into the Council chambers feeling like he finally had a value to them and that value had a body count, he ached for this, the simplicity of bullying his padawan into doing her classwork the same way Obi-Wan had done for him. If he could slow down. If he could stop burning, just long enough, it would’ve been something. They stopped by the Halls to check on Obi-Wan in the evenings, but there wasn’t much point in staying long; Obi-Wan had always hated people hovering over him while he was submerged in bacta, something about _dignity_ and _poise_ and _privacy._ Anakin would accuse him of being a prude, but slaves were sold bare, and he knew a thing or two about a lack of dignity. They sparred after dinner—it was more useful for her than him, because Anakin had long since passed the kind of pressure in him that could be released by just sparring, but it reminded Ahsoka that even if she struggled with her schoolwork, it was because her talents had been honed to a fine point elsewhere.

It was routine that staved off the heat long enough for him to breathe. His rage withered when he remembered Ahsoka in his arms, breathing softly in her sleep; it curled up and died and left him for brief moments, but he was _made_ of heat, and the brief moments where he achieved—something almost like peace—between the roots of the bruncasta trees were a relief he’d never known before in his life. It was a relief he didn’t even know with his wife, because always with Padmé he would have to leave her in the morning, and when he saw her there was a fever just to force everything he felt about her into a handful of hours at a time; but he shared the morning and the day and the evening and the night with Ahsoka. He wasn’t racing against the clock. Their horizon stretched beyond them endlessly. They had ripped the Code to shreds and left it for dead in the sun, and they had done it all in plain sight. He was almost giddy. Around the—the strangeness, the oddness he walked with, he was giddy. Or giddy was just a word, next to what he felt.

He knew, by the end of the week, that he was avoiding Padmé. Anakin hadn’t let himself think of her. It was strange to be on Coruscant and not be possessed by the fever to shove all the love he had for her in every minute he could spare, but he was avoiding her, balking at the thought of her, barreling his attention on the fine point of Ahsoka. He told himself Ahsoka needed him, but the truth was that Ahsoka didn’t need him constantly, and she didn’t so much as need him as she always craved people around her in a way he never had. He was lying to himself, but he was always pretty good at that, and when Padmé commed him on the first morning of the Senate’s weekend, Anakin’s blood ran cold at the same time as it ran backwards. He knew it was her. He recognized the signal number; a string of binary that translated to _angel_ that he’d programmed himself. He’d written the encryption that protected it.

“Your comm’s going off,” Ahsoka said, cheerfully, from the living room.

Anakin turned his commlink over in his hand, but didn’t depress the reception button. “Wow, thank you, what an astute observation, young padawan,” he said, dryly.

“I’m not that much younger than you,” she said, crossly. “We’re closer in age than you and Master Obi-Wan are. Hey, the Jedi Lord, Valenthyne—you know him?”

Anakin snorted. His commlink had stopped beeping, but flashed, indicating he had a message. “I took the same class, Snips. In the same Temple. Of course I do, everyone does.”

There was the rapid-fire tapping of her pen against the datapad. Maybe she’d never realized that her classwork was more normal to him than the war he marched her through—the though disturbed him. “There’s a trivia question. What’s the honor he was given by the Ruusan system?”  
  


“They named an asteroid belt Farfalla’s Diamonds after him,” Anakin said, mildly. “That could’ve been an astronav question, though, Farfalla’s Diamonds are hell to get around. Spacers typically call ‘em something else. It’s, uh, ruder.”

Ahsoka whooped. “Needed that bonus point,” she said.

Anakin clipped his commlink back to his glove, and then shuffled to their pantry. He’d stopped by the day after they’d landed to pick up a few things here and there from the cafeteria; usually Jedi filed their orders for their groceries to their quartermaster, and it went up the chain until then the order was placed and deliveries were sorted out and made. Anakin’s chore rotation had only landed on deliveries a few times, because most of the time he had shamed the Order in one way or another and was then assigned punitively to any of the various cleaning duties, which were largely considered the worst chores among the padawans. The other padawans had joked that Anakin’s only real friends were the dianogae that lived in the Temple’s trash compactors, and Anakin had resented it—and punched a couple people for it, though he’d never gotten to punch Ferus for it—but it was kind of true, because he’d been around the dianogae of the Temple often enough that they’d stopped considering his scent as indication of potential prey. At least, he liked to think the dianoga in the fourth Temple quarter only wrapped a massive, ruddy tentacle around him as a sign of affection. He’d named that one Byorek. The Jedi Temple prided itself on its self-sufficiency, that the Jedi cared for and cleaned their Temple as a form of respect, but Anakin hadn’t been on a chore rotation since the start of the war—he didn’t even know what chores the Knight class was responsible for. He certainly didn’t have time to place an order for groceries with their quartermaster, and, to be frank, he wasn’t exactly sure who their quartermaster was, anymore. So he’d gone down to the kitchens and snatched a couple of things, so they weren’t constantly stuck adhering to the cafeteria’s meal shifts, and because—Anakin wasn’t even sure when those shifts were, anymore. So much had changed.

He squinted at the lack of anything useful on the shelves. “Have I taught you how to beg the kitchens to let you steal things,” he said. He didn’t particularly feel like going all the way down to the kitchens to lift more food, because inevitably then they’d ask him, _Skywalker, surely you could’ve just placed an order by now, it’s been a week,_ and then Anakin would have to admit that he was pretty sure the Knight that was their quartermaster had died. The thought made his heart ache. It was too real, to say the change out loud, so he would say it only to himself.

“You can do that?” Ahsoka said.

Anakin worked his jaw. So much she didn’t know, and this was supposed to be her home, the Jedi supposed to be her family. “They Knighted Obi-Wan so quickly that they didn’t have codes for him, and they kind of just stuffed him into the first Knights’ quarters they found, and it took ages to figure out who our quartermaster was. He showed me how to take from the kitchens. He said he’d figured it out because Qui-Gon apparently forgot to make dinner all the time.”

“How do you have a padawan and then forget to feed him,” Ahsoka snorted. “Seems like rule one of having a padawan would be feeding it.”

Anakin straightened. He did not want to admit that he’d been thinking about bullying Ahsoka into being responsible for feeding both of them. “I didn’t think it was that weird.”

_“You_ feed _me._ Remember that time you yelled at Master Tiin on the holoconference because he didn’t order Togruta-specific ration bars for the _Resolute?_ In front of the Chancellor, and then Master Windu commed you afterwards every day for a week and you wouldn’t answer? That was awesome.”

Anakin rubbed beneath his eyes. “Blast it. Don’t remind me. Is he here? We could dig out one of those exotic pet shops and put firebeetles in his robes.”

Ahsoka giggled. “In front of the _Chancellor,”_ she said, elated. He could feel her joy, stretched out proudly between the two of them, and—he could tell, now, that it had meant a lot to her that Anakin had made a big deal of it, even as embarrassed as she’d acted at the time.

Anakin turned the corner and leaned against the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. Ahsoka was sprawled on the couch, not tall enough yet to even take up all of it, her datapad for class discarded on the table, grinning like something predatory. Which, most technically, she was. “The Chancellor doesn’t care,” he said. “He’s an old friend. He probably got a kick out of it.”

_He’s seen me do worse,_ was what he didn’t tell her, because the Chancellor was the one who had gentled him through the ache that lived in him, the one that was so impossible to breathe around when he was younger. The Chancellor had squeezed his shoulder when Anakin had almost cried in his office, recounting how the Healer who had reviewed him had said the deactivated transmitter in his neck would be dangerous to remove thanks to its proximity to his spinal cord—it had been the Chancellor who had offered his personal services in seeking a second opinion, and Anakin had then _actually_ cried when he turned it down. _If the Jedi say—if it can’t be done, it can’t be done,_ Anakin had mumbled, swinging his legs, still too short for the chair. The Chancellor had made it clear the offer was always open. Maybe Anakin should pay him a visit.

Ahsoka’s nose wrinkled. “I forget the two of you are friends sometimes. How does that even happen? It’s like me being friends with, I don’t know, Senator Orn Free Taa.”

Anakin swallowed. Senatorial relationships were not exactly on his docket for acceptable conversation topics. “I saved his planet once, and he’s always looked out for me after that. It’s not that strange.”

Ahsoka bobbed her head. “Right! Right. Sorry, I forgot that. This Farfalla stuff is knocking everything else I know out of my brain. That’s why you’re friends with Senator Amidala.”

Anakin turned his head away from her, eyes burning, and for a minute he wanted to accuse her of leading questions, of some kind of manipulation—and then the rage surged in him and he vividly dreamed of taking the table her work was lying on and smashing it against the wall until it was shards of splinters. “Yes,” he said, strangled.

Ahsoka was cringing away from him. “Sorry,” she said, quietly. She wasn’t looking at him. She only didn’t look at him when she was uncomfortable.

The roiling guilt choked him. He couldn’t breathe around it, nothing like the dry heat of double noon, everything like the wet, slow heat of a tropical jungle, of battlefields he’d marched through, death he’d brought with him somewhere distant. If Ahsoka had dropped dead right then, this was the last she’d have of him. If Padmé was dead, if she’d died while he’d ignored her, that was the last she’d have of him. He’d get on his knees and try to force their hearts to beat but there would be nothing he could do, because maybe that was his fate; too little, too late.

He rolled his shoulders. Anakin tried to imagine a physical leash, a physical bantha leather cord, and then imagined ripping it back—were he an anooba, the collar would cut into his throat, cut off his air, and his front paws would leave the sand as his momentum was curtailed. He imagined choking, and then he could breathe, and then he rolled his shoulders and rasped, “I’m sorry.”

Ahsoka shrugged. “It happens,” she said, and she sounded—curious.

Anakin scrubbed a hand over his face. “You know, the—the way the Force is, now,” he said, tightly, “I forgot, that—shielding has to be different. I’m sorry.”

The white markings over Ahsoka’s brow furrowed. “I just don’t know what made you that angry.”

Anakin flicked a hand. “It’s not you. It’s—it’s—I’m always, I don’t know. It’s always that.”

Ahsoka cut her eyes to the corner of the room. “Sounds terrible.” Anakin jerked back, and he could almost physically feel slapped, his cheeks burning. “I meant I thought it sounds terrible _for_ you,” she amended, quickly.

Anakin blew out a long breath. “Senator Amidala and I are—complicated,” he said. “That’s it. It’s just—complicated.”

Ahsoka worried her lip. Her eyes looked him up and down. “Sore subject, I’m guessing.”

She looked too—she looked too kind, curled up on the couch, clearly under some belief that Anakin’s relationship to Padmé was fraught and difficult and strange. It was not at all the truth. It was so far from the warmth he felt with his wife, the love, the golden days on Varykino they’d spent wrapped in each other, that he almost wanted to march Ahsoka to Padmé’s apartment and beg his wife to explain. _Tell her we’re good, tell her because I don’t know how, tell her that this is good,_ like he could throw away all of their careful secrecy simply because he couldn’t stand Ahsoka looking at him kindly. _You deserved better than a price tag._

“Tell you what,” Ahsoka said, standing, stretching her arms high over her head. “I’m gonna bother Rex for a while. Maybe I’ll sneak him into the Temple.”

“Didn’t mean to chase you off,” Anakin said, roughly.

Ahsoka crossed over to him, and, effortlessly, without a moment’s hesitation, wrapped her arms around his waist. Effortlessly, without a moment’s hesitation, his arms settled around her, and he pressed a kiss between her montrals the way he’d found he really liked to do—the unsettled thing in him died down.

“You get grumpy when you don’t have enough time to be grumpy alone,” she said, a lilt of mocking in her voice.

Anakin tugged on one of her stubby little montrals. “I’m a delight, actually.”  
  


Ahsoka swatted his hand. “Stop that. Those are sensitive. You know it’s a symbol of, uh, love on Shili, to touch montrals? Those are sensitive!”

Anakin stilled. “Wait, like—”

“It’s a friend thing, or a family thing,” Ahsoka said, quickly, and her embarrassment sounded clear like a klaxon in the Force.

“Really,” Anakin said. Tentatively, he tugged on one of her montrals again, and said, “I figure that’s about as close as I can get, without, er, horns.”

Ahsoka stared at him for a full minute, long enough that he was scared he’d insulted her. Then she buried her face in his chest and crushed him with her arms—she was a lot stronger than she used to be—babbling something so quickly it was incoherent. Anakin chuckled again, and then rubbed her shoulders, beneath the tail of her lekku, and after a while Ahsoka finally let him go.

She scrubbed at her eyes. “Thanks,” she said, awkwardly.

He patted the top of her head, the way that he always did when he was saying something about her vertical challenges—because Anakin knew it would make her feel short, and the pettiness would distract her from the bright blooming thing he could feel from her, that was making his chest ache. “Take heart, little one,” he said, finally. “And give Rex hell.”

Ahsoka beamed. “When don’t I?”

And she bolted off, her presence less intense thanks to the distance, but—still there, like a warm little star buried next to his heart. There was another little star buried next to his heart that he needed to see.

Padmé’s apartment at the 500 Republica was a security nightmare and the source of a not insignificant amount of Anakin’s literal nightmares; Padmé’s veranda was open, only equipped to be shielded with a privacy ray shield that had some security capabilities, but Padmé had it turned off when the Coruscant Weather Authority had scheduled the day to be particularly nice. _I will get as close to fresh air as I can, and you won’t judge me for it,_ she’d said, once, while Anakin had complained to her about it, leaned against her marbled kitchen counter. Shirtless, the sweat on his skin drying quickly and leaving him frigid, enjoying the image of his wife in a sheer robe leaning into her refrigerator, searching for the Lake Country wine she was so fond of she had it imported. It was never, altogether, that hard to sneak into the 500 Republica itself, and Padmé’s apartment felt like it was somehow designed for the express purpose of a Jedi husband to sneak in. He kept a covered unregistered speeder to fly there hidden in a garage on the lower levels, with a mechanic he’d often exchanged retrofitted parts of _—dubious_ legality—with. The Nautolan, Dyven, was smart enough to not ask questions. Anakin usually made quick work of the flight there—he disappeared too easily for even the clone task force assigned to Coruscant, and back when the task force had been compromised of police droids, they’d never even stood a chance. This time, he ended up crawling in through the window at the end of her kitchen; it had become something of a game, the different ways he could find to appear in her apartment.

It was less of a game when he startled his wife so badly she almost dropped the glass of wine in her hand.

“Blast it,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest. It was the Senate’s weekend, and while technically it was her day off, he knew she usually was never without something to do—the war raged in so many sectors across the galaxy and erupted so many political fires, keeping constantly apprised of the news kept not only Padmé, but the army of secretaries and interns she’d hired for the purpose of staying apprised more than busy. He had enough trouble keeping up, and his only work was the war itself. But she was dressed far too relaxed, for her to have been working beforehand. She was in a black nightgown, patterned with bold white lace, an elegant shawl draped across her shoulders—he’d learned quickly that this was what relaxed looked like, on his wife.

“Some warning, Anakin, would’ve been appreciated,” she said, rubbing her sternum. Anakin was aware, then, suddenly, of the deep cut of the neckline, and he swallowed.

“People call me spontaneous for a reason,” he said. He turned and closed the window behind him. “You didn’t lock this, by the way.”

“Usually, when my husband crawls through the kitchen window, he warns me that he’s going to before he does,” she said. Anyone else, and it might have been said with acid; but he could hear her delight.

Anakin winced. “In your husband’s defense, I’m sure he didn’t know you were going for a glass of wine at lunch, my love, and I’m sure he can imagine some creative ways to make it up to you.”

This was their normal. This was what they did; the soft banter that melted into love that melted into lovemaking. But the idea of touching her, with his hands, the ones that had touched the Queen—she’d called him _gorgeous—_ felt sickening. His stomach turned. Anakin thought that he might have to cut off his hands, first, before touching her, and then it would be alright.

“In my defense, I was going for the wine on account of being worried about my… _creative_ husband,” Padmé said. She hooked a finger around the neck of the bottle on the counter next to her, and topped off her glass. “In my defense, I may have also already made a mess of the day, and maybe decided to make it worse.”

“There are other things we could make a mess of,” Anakin said, mildly, and—Padmé would hate him for saying that, because he was avoiding the weighted word, the _worried._ Padmé would see it written on him clearly. She never appreciated overtures like that when there was something else she wanted to discuss, and Anakin’s habit of trying to distract her got on her last nerve. It was—instinct, worked into him from years of use, and it had served him so well with the Queen. He had served the Queen so well.

Sure enough, Padmé’s dark eyes narrowed. “I had to learn you were going on an undercover mission after you’d already returned from it, and then I had to learn that mission was located on _Zygerria,_ with all the other details redacted except that—the Kiros colony was involved. I was worried about you. I gave you space, and then I gave you more space, and then I thought something might be wrong, so commed, and you didn’t—and instead you show up, waltzing into—into everything! The way that you always do. I’ve had enough of being brushed off, Anakin. If you don’t want to talk, that’s alright, just tell me—”

“The people of Kiros were taken by the Separatists and sold into slavery on Zygerria, as part of their effort to rebuild the Zygerrian Empire,” Anakin said, sharply. “We went undercover to retrieve them, and we did. Everything’s redacted because Obi-Wan’s in a bacta tank and won’t be pulled out until a couple days from now, and the official report can’t be made without him because he’s the one who was sanctioned with command. It’s over. Nothing to worry about.”

Padmé’s eyes softened. He loved it as much as he hated it; he wanted that gentleness, craved it, wanted to feel it and then to give it back to her, but also sometimes he was the dog, on the leash, and the whip was the only thing that had his name written on it. “That sounds miserable. Is he alright?” she asked.

Anakin shrugged. “Last time I spoke to him, he was high on painkillers. It was—hilarious, actually. He called me a moppet.”

_“Obi-Wan_ did?” Padmé said, her eyes bright. “A moppet? Oh, that’s accurate. You were adorable.”

Anakin leveled a scowl at her, and she giggled, and sipped her wine. “What, Ani? You’re still adorable. It’s a condition. You really should have someone check on that.”

Anakin bit his tongue to keep from saying _I would like you to,_ because he had gotten—familiar with his overtures, with the Queen. The excessive praise, the idea that he craved her and wouldn’t stop telling her how much he did—even if he had been lying, even if she knew he was lying—it had worked wonders in the past and it had worked wonders with the Queen. It was what vain and powerful people wanted: flattery. But his wife was powerful and not vain. The way she looked was another weapon in her arsenal. Right now, glass of wine in hand, unmade face, her curls in a tangled topknot and the strap of her nightgown sliding over one shoulder, this was her. He needed to remember that.

“I’ll make it a priority,” Anakin said, dryly.

Padmé pulled another glass out of the cupboard and then emptied the bottle into it, and passed it to him. “Stay the day with me,” she murmured. “I missed you, my love. And if I must make a mess of things, I want to do it with you.”

Anakin picked up the glass, and—he needed to calm down. If he didn’t find a way to lance the poison in him, he was going to explode. So he knocked the entire glass back in a gulp, and then said, “I really hope you know that you can’t possibly be more of a mess than me, my lady.”

Padmé’s eyes softened impossibly more even as the corners of her mouth quirked up. “I can try. Why don’t I tell you about my day, and you tell me about yours, and then we’ll see.”

“Appealing to my competitiveness is unfair,” Anakin whined. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast with Ahsoka, and he could already feel the warm buzz of the drink.

Padmé ducked into the fridge and pulled out another bottle of wine, uncorked it, and filled his glass again. “I’m actually appealing to the fact that you can’t hold your alcohol for anything.”

Anakin scowled, again, but Padmé only laughed and hooked him by the wrist—her touch hurt and soothed in equal measure—to lead him into the secluded den they spent a fair amount of time in, rather than the broad, open living room that led to the breezy veranda. She brought the bottle in her other hand, and then set it on the end table with a solid thunk. She pulled off her commlink, and switched the indicator to silent, and folded herself on the couch—her motions were all precise, but uncomplicated.

“You don’t have to stand there,” she said. “You haven’t been this awkward around me since Varykino.”

Anakin huffed, and then settled on the couch beside her, taking another drink of his glass. “I’m not sure how I feel about being baited into inebriation,” he said. “Tell me about your day, then, my lady. Let’s see if I can’t top your mess.”

“I shouted at Bail,” she said. “We had breakfast. And it’s—it’s been a frustrating week, because we’re losing the battle on allocating more funds to relief efforts in favor of the ground tanks that Kuat’s prepared to sell to the Republic. It’s difficult, trying to get—it’s just difficult, and then I was worried about you, and I took it out on poor Bail. He was talking about Breha—they want a child, you know, and Breha wants to wait until the war is closer to ending—but it sounded so, so dismissive the way he said it. He’s a wonderful man and everyone has their moments, but Mother Goddess, I laid into him. He hasn’t spoken to me since. And then I was trying to figure out how to apologize, and I—I made Jar Jar cry.”  
  


“I think Jar Jar cries because of most things,” Anakin said.

“He does! It’s true!” Padmé said. “But, well, I felt awful. And sick. And worried. I commed you, and there was no response, and I just—why not pull open a bottle of wine? It’s nothing terrible, it’s just—frustrating.”

As she spoke, she curled into him, her head resting on his shoulder—she was so much smaller than him. He enjoyed it, mostly because he could pick her up and spin her around, and she would smile and she had the most wonderful smile—she smiled with her whole heart, it seemed. Anakin reached over and tucked one of the dangling ringlets from her messily tied hair behind her ear.

“You’ll apologize and it’ll be fine,” he said. “No reason to be upset, my lady. The stress will pass.”

“I wish it would,” she murmured. “There’s always so much work to be done.”

Anakin understood that. His life had become an endless march of war, the endless drumbeat of deaths resonating through the Force; and whether he was in pain, or his soldiers, or anyone else, he couldn’t tell, just that he was buried to his neck in pain. “It’ll end,” he said, quietly.

“It will,” she said, severely. Her free hand found his, and she locked their fingers together. “I’ll see to it myself.”

Anakin’s mouth quirked upwards. “Oh, of course, my lady. The patented Padmé Naberrie approach—ask for peace, and then if the galaxy says otherwise, _aggressively negotiate_ until peace is found.”

“I should get that engraved on my blaster,” Padmé said, laughing.

“If you do, I’ll get it engraved on my lightsaber. You always said coordination is the most important part of fashion.”

“We’ll get caught.”

Anakin snorted. “If anyone gets close enough to your blaster _and_ my lightsaber and _lives,_ we _deserved_ to get caught.”

Padmé laughed so hard she snorted, and then Anakin laughed, because it was cute, frankly—it eased something, the laughter. He was hard and dangerous but Padmé liked to laugh with him and use him as a Jedi-shaped pillow, and, to be honest, he was starting to think he liked himself more when he was around her than he did anywhere else.

They resettled until he was laid against the back of the couch and Padmé was pressed flush against him, their arms looped lazily around each other. She turned on a holofilm, too, and although they mostly talked through it, it was good, to just—be around her, and let the wine make him slow and warm and bumbling. The fever he had to pour everything he felt for her into just a handful of time was gone, because the wine made him sink into the couch and enjoy the room spinning brightly about them, his responses to her quips increasingly strange.

“You should’ve been able to make it three quarters through a bottle before you got to the point where you’re telling me my _hands_ are pretty,” she said, cutting her eyes at him. “Tell me you ate before you got here.”

“I did not, in point of fact,” Anakin said, and then he snatched one of her hands and pressed their palms together. Her hand was much smaller than his own. “Look at this. It’s practically— _dainty,_ my lady.”

“How dare you,” she said, a smile breaking across her face. “I am not dainty, I am poised.”  
  


Anakin grinned back at her. “If I have to be adorable, you have to be dainty. It’s a condition, lady love.”

Padmé nuzzled her face into his robes. “I was supposed to ask you about your day before we got to this point.”

“Well, you’re under the influence, darling, I think you can excuse yourself the—the indiscretion,” he said, but he had to keep stopping to laugh. What was there that was so funny? Or was it just the warmth of everything?

“Get up,” she said. “Get up, you have to eat, and so should I.”

“I’m not cooking, and I know you’re not cooking,” he said.

“Who do you think I am? That’s what the delivery is for,” she said.

She stood, and so did he, after a moment of reckoning with his new and faulty sense of balance. Anakin stooped over and scooped up his wine glass and polished off the drink that was left, and then followed her—she always grabbed him by the hand when she was leading him places, like he’d never be able to find his own way, but he didn’t honestly mind—to the kitchen, where she left him with a glass of water and then placed an order at the holotable in her conference room. She was quick about it—Padmé was something of a regular, he knew, because so often her work ran late enough that the concept of fixing her own meal just exhausted her more. He downed half the glass of water while he waited, and then she slipped in through the doorway.

“You liked that curry, right?” she said. “From Archeballo’s. The Corellian one.”

Anakin bobbed his head. “It was incredible,” he said. “Though I guess I eat mostly rations. I might find a salted cracker incredible.”

Padmé smiled thinly. “I like to treat you.”

“I don’t want to know the collective cost of the food and wine you’ve given me,” he said. “It might actually be more than what I could’ve sold for.”

She stiffened, then, and her eyes were wide and hurt. “Ani,” she said, softly.

Anakin waved a hand. “It’s a joke, my lady. Nothing meant by it.”

“I think it’s a miserable joke,” she said, quietly.

“Not your life to joke about,” he snapped.

Padmé flinched backwards, and Anakin’s guilt—as old as his fury and as good a friend—flooded him. He scrubbed at his face, and let out a long breath, and said, “Sorry,” in the nicest way he could muster, but it still ended up clipped and sharp.

“We have a pattern,” she said, slowly. “We have a pattern, where when you’re upset, you’ll snap. You apologize, so I don’t mind. But you keep doing it, because sometimes I think you’re never not upset about something. You snap in small ways and then in bigger ones because nothing ever goes away. It’s not going to change unless you change it.”

“I don’t feel like changing it,” Anakin snarled. He turned on his heel, sharply, and stalked back and forth through her kitchen, pacing like the tied animal that had no horizon to run across. “I don’t feel like it because I can’t. I can’t because it doesn’t go away. Don’t ask me to do anything else, it’s not possible.”

“Okay,” she said, softly. “I’m not trying to attack you, love. And I think—about this—you have every right to be angry. I understand snapping at people. I did it today, with a lot less reason. But what I mean is that I think it hurts you more to not address it. I’m not asking you to let go. I’m asking you to share the burden, so it doesn’t crush you.”

Anakin stilled, and worked his jaw. “It won’t.”

Padmé shifted. “We both know your anger has gotten the better of you before.”

Anakin flinched. “It has,” he said, acidly. “It did. I killed them like an animal. I get it, now, I understand. I know what people want me for. That’s always the question, what you can do—what skills do you have, what can they be priced at. How high do you price violence? Do you think the Separatists would pay more, or the Republic? That’s what they want. That’s what everyone wants. I _get_ it. The Queen—I went to her, posing, undercover. I flirted with her, because that was my job. I am always doing my job. I flirted with her and gained her favor by telling her that I had killed for her. One of her slaves rebelled against her and tried to kill her, and I defended her, I defended the Queen. I impressed her. We were trying to find the location of the colonists, I was buying Obi-Wan and Rex time while they snuck around as guards—but I impressed her because I knew how. I’ve always known how. I _get_ it. I killed them like an animal because I _am_ one. Like sees like.”  
  


His chest was heaving. Padmé reached out for him, and she was saying something, but his blood was roaring in his ears and he was terrified of losing her, and he was terrified of what would happen to him if he didn’t say it.

Anakin whirled around, pacing in jerky, tight strides again. “I know what I am!” he roared. “Ahsoka and Obi-Wan and Rex were caught, Obi-Wan and Rex were taken to a processing facility on Kadavo. Ahsoka was hidden—in a cage. They put _my padawan_ in a cage. I should have fucking killed them all. The Queen leveraged their lives for my service, because she wanted me, and she wanted me—because she knew what I am. On Tatooine, when we were loaned out—happened often, the shop wasn’t always successful, easy way to make money—slavedrivers always used anooba to keep us in line. Those damn dogs. Step out of line and then there’s a set of teeth in your shoulder. All they did was starve and try not to starve. I hated them, but I’m not better. I gave the Queen my service because she knew how to fit a leash. If she asked me to, for them, I would have killed in her name. I _know.”_

Padmé swiped at her cheeks. Anakin hated it when she cried, but it didn’t happen often. “What service,” she said, tightly, lowly.

“I think you know,” he said, quietly. “I’m sorry. I was unfaithful. But it was only work.”

Padmé’s breath hitched, and then she reached for his flesh hand, and folded both of hers around it. “My love,” she said, quietly, “the word for that is not unfaithful. There is a different word for it. You’re not an animal, you’re a man. What you did to the Tuskens, you did that as a person—but the kindness you show me, the kindness you show Ahsoka, you do that as a person, too. You are more than any one piece of you. You’re not an animal, because you know what you do, and its yours to answer for whether it’s good or bad. You’re not an animal, but that also means that the people who hurt you did that to a sentient person. You deserved better. So did the Tuskens. Both can be true at the same time.”

Her hands moved to cup his face, and then he knew he was crying, too, because her thumbs swept over his cheeks. “And I think that the parts of you that are scary—I think they’re there because you were hurt in ways you shouldn’t have been,” she said. “That’s my point, Ani, love. On some level, yes, you can’t unlive the life you have. But you can share the burden, and it’ll be easier. I think, sometimes, that you even want to.”

Anakin hunched his shoulders. “I don’t understand you, sometimes, my lady,” he said, quietly. “But I want to.”

Padmé’s hands roved back to the nape of his neck, tangling her fingers in his hair. “And how is it any different for me?”

Which was, naturally, when her doorbell sounded, and the two of them jumped apart while Padmé hastily scrubbed her face and darted off to tip the pilot and then bring in the bags of food. Anakin hid in the kitchen and listen to the low hum of their voices, trying to piece together exactly what had happened to him in the last—however long it had been. Time passed blurrily, the lights around him too bright and too loud. They retreated back to the den, Padmé shuffling in and out with another glass of water for him and then plates and silverware.

He was suddenly so absurdly grateful for—whatever it was, whatever fate had brought them together, so absurdly grateful that she was settling in beside him and chattering about what holofilm she was turning on that he leaned down and pressed his cheek to her thin shoulder and leaned some of his weight on her.

“Don’t tell me you’re about to fall asleep,” she said.

“Remember what I said, when we were married,” he said. _“Luke aahl ali khan._ I meant that.”

Her hand rose and she rubbed the space between his shoulder blades. “I love you, too, Ani. And I mean that. Now please eat, before you fall asleep, because I can’t move you.”

Anakin pulled himself upright, and then found the bowl of the Corellian curry she knew he liked, and instead of dishing it out onto a plate, he just grabbed a fork and started eating it from the container. It was delicious, both sweet and spicy, but mostly he’d forgotten how hungry he’d been—as they ate they settled in for the holofilm, this time only managing to talk through some of it, but he didn’t pay attention to anything that happened. He was focused only on the warm press of Padmé’s thigh against his, and—for the first time in a lifetime, for longer than a breath, he felt some kind of relief. It wouldn’t last the night, but it would last longer than it had before. It was its own kind of victory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did name the Nautolan mechanic Dyven. As in. _Dive in._ I'm VERY funny thank you for noticing.
> 
> Anakin's POV was a lot less disturbing this time on account of the fact that he has a higher proximity to people he loves for all of it, and I'll be real, my ability to write Anakin and Padme being sad at each other is deep in the negatives. I just think their lives are so terrible and there's so much angst and c'mon, why can't they laugh a little? I think they should be idiots. I know it's plot-required that Anakin has massive amounts of damage but like, c'mon. By the by, their talk at the end doesn't really serve in any capacity other than to force Anakin to stop being weird - it's not really a fixing moment, just the moment that leads to the, like, 967 separate fixing moments Anakin needs to have to be like, good at being a person. Also gee Anakin why'd the author let you have so many POVs. Definitely can't be favoritism. Also, please someone notice that I earnestly wrote that Anakin's only friends at the Temple are the giant trash octopuses that live in the dumpsters, that was a very important moment of realization I had. Byorek the trash monster was the one Anakin read his shitty teenage poetry to (from a safe distance out of tentacle-range) PLEASE validate my authorial observations. 
> 
> I promise we're getting to Obi-Wan eventually but like, structurally, Obi-Wan is the final boss of the emotional showdown, we have to save him for last. This is like playing Dark Souls but instead of demon monsters it's just emotional repression, and that means Anakin and Obi-Wan have to do battle.

**Author's Note:**

> Anakin's POV is definitely the most fucked-up one here, promise. His POV is interspersed with, like, his intensely weird and kind of grotesque relationship with his own agency, which is disturbing normally but is more disturbing at this point in time. It's also interspersed with, like, various murderous/violent urges and traumatic memories, which makes for a nice cocktail of Holy Shit, What The Fuck? that I think of when I think of him. Obi-Wan's POV is probably just going to be cripplingly emotionally stunted by comparison. Most emotional issues look garden variety when next to the guy who, like, murders children, cries while he does it, and then goes and murders more children. 
> 
> Also, don't @ me about my Huttese. I didn't research it and I made it up, but I don't care. I wrote that phrase for another fic but now it's my unassailable headcanon that Luke's name means love, it can happen because Luke Skywalker is both best boy and best Jedi and best Rebel pilot and best short king, which is all definitely objective fact. My heavy-handed wordplay can be heavy-handed if I demand it. Leave me be


End file.
